Audiomulch Screencast Video: The Metasurface

August 28, 2007

Kind of hidden away from the main areas of the program is the Metasurface, an experimental graphical virtual control surface that comes with Audiomulch. enabling an almost tactile transitional capacity to the program. Underneath the Metasurface is an Audiomulch document that has been snapshot eight times and each state is a destination on the Metasurface. It's cool - check out the Gearwire screencast tutorial video.

Get more information about Audiomulch at the official Audiomulch website.

This is so very neat.

By: Anonymous Coward

This is so very neat.

Wed, 2007-08-29 11:10

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Story Transcription:

ROB WARMOWSKI: Hello again everybody. This is Gearwire.Com’s series of educational videos on the Audiomulch application. Right now, we are going to take a look at the Metasurface, which is one of the most visually stunning things about Audiomulch.

The Metasurface is a visual control surface that implements an XY axis field in which to choose transitions between different document snapshots. Now, what does all that mean? Remember that all of this in Audiomulch comprises the document. The document is the contraptions that add up to the sound that we hear out of the sound card. In this case, the structure of our document has one source, and that is the 10-harmonics generator. This is a generator that sends out harmonic -- it sends out bass frequencies and harmonics of that frequency, and it is being sent into two main signal chains that are kind of identical actually but with different settings of course. The chain order is there is a pulse comb filter and there is a gain stage and a phaser effect and then a 5Comb filter, and both of these are then sent back to mono at a digital distortion contraption called DigiGrunge, and then this goes into a delay line granulator. This is a delay line that acts as a granulating circuit in that it takes small pieces in rapid succession of the signal instead of passing a contiguous signal, out of the granulator and also clean out of both channels, or rather ungranulated and un-grunged out of both wet channels into the stereo delay, into a stereo gain, and then into the sound out.

Now, if we look at this document, we see all of these contraptions and we see their states. We could see actually that both sides of the -- on both sides of the chains, or I should say on both chains, the post comb filter is set to identical values, so it will be interesting to see what actually changes when we go ahead and run this patch.

Now running this patch actually involves -- or running this document, I should say, involves using a control surface. Now each one of these -- Oh I say -- Sorry about this -- I should be a little more specific. Right now, we are looking at a state of the document called high tick-tock, and high tick-tock is a sound that we will hear if we actually mouse down in the Metasurface in this area, and high tick-tock represents the -- all of the fader state that you see here on all of the contraptions on the document. If we go to another setting, one called grind, here’s grind’s area in the Metasurface, you can see that the faders are in a very different state, and the great thing about Metasurface is you can click and drag to get the sounds to slowly evolve from one state to another and anyone of these sounds are available slowly evolve from one state to another to evolve amongst each other. I hope I’m explaining this well, so let’s take a look at full screen. Actually, let’s get -- let’s start the -- Let’s actually just turn on audio...

[ROB WARMOWSKI PLAYING AN AUDIOMULCH DOCUMENT]

...and into a full screen. So, you’re hearing grind right now. If I mouse down, we hear sort of the central sound of grind. Now, I could move -- I’m still holding -- and I could move in any direction. I can move toward Rain Clicks over to the left there or I could move towards String Chords up to the top, or I can move to Dissonant Chords which is up into the left. Let’s move toward Rain Clicks and see what happens.