#51

I can’t really offer any help on this, sorry. Just wanted to say that I live directly on the ocean, in a bay used for crabbing and depending on what the wind is like, I can hear the people out in the boats talking as if they were in the house, but in a different room. It really freaked me out at first, but now I’m used to it. In my experience, sound travels very weirdly across water.

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#52

Suspect there are two very different approaches - one is about making something ‘appear’ as described (sound system emulation with filtering & complex slap delays)… then there is the physics, which if modelled perfectly might be far less interesting/effective.

I did a ton of research for a film years ago and (ignoring the speaker stack for a moment) achieving realistic distance is incredibly complex. Apart from the speed of sound (over tidal water in your case) and the roll off of frequencies with distance, you also have to think about temperature and wind shearing, which contributes a kind of freq specific doppler/smearing effect… Near the sea, there is often wind… So is the sound travelling with the wind (carried by the wind) or against/muffled by it? Or a perfectly still day, with humidity? Its all variable with frequency… Nature, so complex.

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#53

Wild! (literally) Plenty to think about, thanks. I brought this up elsewhere too and someone rightly pointed out that a body of water is not going to be big on reflections in the same way an enclosed room is, so perhaps convolution is not that great an idea for the “across the water” aspect.

#55

You know your friend better than I do but I think it’s worth asking whether he means a sound he’s experienced (and can recall it) or whether it’s metaphorical.

There’s a lot you can do metaphorically with IR’s that might feel like a massive body of water, using the sounds of bubbles or waves crashing, etc.

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#56

I’m pondering a workflow for using the ER-301 to capture IR of my feedback loops. I would then pop the SD out of the ER-301 and into my Mungo c1 for longer-term use. Has anyone done similar (captured an IR of their synth)?

What is the ideal impulse to use? I am pondering using a very short burst of white noise, decay-only envelope, with varying decays.

#57

I’ve only recorded my own Ir’s once with the m4l convolution reverb pro but i have this pretty cool one from a hotel pool:

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#58

Technically you could make an IR of that scenario - put a large speaker stack on one side of a large body of water and a recording setup on the other, then play a sine sweep through the speakers.
(side note - you only really need one IR for this type of modelling, provided the sound source and recording device you use for the distance IR sound similar to what you want)

Unfortunately this has a couple of limitations: first the practical, given that it’s near impossible to achieve that setup and find a time without atmospheric noises getting into the IR. secondly the aesthetic, convolution is a linear process and will not capture any of the different forms of dynamic distortion or turbulence that occur in the system. In this case, any gradual sound changes made by waves, winds or even standing on different spots of the island won’t be reflected in the IR.

for something not convolution based there’s an old plugin called OutdoorVerb which tries to convey the very sparse echos of outdoor spaces - not sure if it would be useful at all but this seems like a good situation to try it.

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#59

I haven’t captured an IR of a synth but the general physics are similar between physical systems, hardware devices, and software chains.
There are 3 main ways to make IRs - which is better depends on the scenario.

  1. True Impulse - mainly for software, or hardware devices with audio line inputs - Create an audio file with the first sample at maximum value and everything else silent. Play this through your system and record the output. The output file is your IR.
  2. Realistic impulse - mainly for acoustic spaces or hardware - Make any sort of quick, loud, sound that fills the frequency spectrum as evenly as possible, and recording the resulting echos. Options include noise bursts, starter pistols, hand claps, etc… just be aware that your choice of impulse sound WILL color the output.
  3. Sine Sweep - mainly for acoustic spaces but it works everywhere - demonstrated here. it’s one of the most clean methods because it avoids most of the physical limitations of your sound source’s ability to produce every frequency at one instant in time.
  • bonus: you can do the same deconvolution process with other sources than a sine sweep! However, the sine sweep is still one of the most reliable sources.

If you are going for cleanliness, always lean towards the Sine Sweep - record the dry sweep, then record the sweep through your system, then deconvolve using software. If a fully accurate IR isn’t that important to you, then play around with different techniques and keep the IRs you like. It’s a creative process, after all!

final note - if the feedback loop in question involves some sort of distortion, compression, saturation, or other non-linear process, convolution won’t faithfully recreate the behavior of the system. That doesn’t mean you won’t get an interesting result though!

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#60

I’ve seen recently an ERC-1 demo, but it was not so good. How is your experience with the ERC-1? I would like to pick one to do sample and audio manipulation. Could you tell us your experience with it?

#61

I’d have to clean them up, but Pauchi Sazaki and I made some of the Mills College Concert Hall Lobby and the campus Chapel around 8 or 9 years ago, if folks are interested.

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#62

I have an impulse made from a space shuttle launch in Florida that might be perfect for this! I can’t remember where I found it, but DM me and I’ll send you a copy.

Edit: I found it!

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#63

Thanks a lot, I’ll pass it along!

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#64

I haven’t done anything extremely experimental with the ECR-1. I’ve only been using it as an end of chain effect, but taking advantage of the CV modulation. I’m happy with the results from it, but I would recommend waiting on getting one until they release a new firmware for it. The current firmware doesn’t allow for saving/loading presets. You can save impulse responses but if you restart your system you will have to select your impulse response(s) and adjust all your settings again. If you’re someone who leaves their system on all the time or start fresh every time maybe this won’t be an issue for you. The firmware is hardware based (Raspberry Pi Compute Module (I think)) so if you do get a unit now you would still have to buy a new firmware from them whenever they release it.

#65

you will absolutely want the smearing effect of an allpass filter (or three) and to tune it by ear - if you don’t have easy access to a specialised one (plugin), try the shortest reverb you can find.

#66

I’ve never used it but the process they go through to capture multiple IRs in concert halls for use in the VSL MIR plugin is impressive! For example the speakers they use for replaying sweeps are on stepper motors, so they can ‘direct’ the source etc… More details here (which inevitably makes me wonder how this could be achieved outdoors!?)

#67

Last night I was looking at the Tasty Chips GR-1 and ECR-1 and it made me wonder what would happen if you gave a convolver a granular playback engine for the impulse responses instead of playing them linearly. Would that even be possible? It would be very cool if you had real time control over the granularization of the IR. I played with the idea a bit last night, running IR samples through a granular plugin and loading the result into a convolver, but without control over the granularization as it’s happening, it’s not much different than just loading up any atypical sample in the thing.

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#68

Could try this with the live convolution mode of the Mungo c1. Were you more interested in the “scattered grains” effect or in time stretching / pitch?

Wasn’t there some one-off custom hardware granular convolver? I wonder what its workflow was.

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#69

I think the scattering grains effect would be most interesting. I’ll see if I can find anything about a hardware unit–I’d love to see what that is if it exists.

EDIT: Is this what you’re talking about? Looks like it was given to a group of people as part of a Red Bull Music Academy thing. Looks interesting but I haven’t made my way through much of the presentation yet.

#70

I guess you could have a granular oscillator and record short sections as single use IRs. A set of rolling buffers. I think possible, but likely quite cpu intensive as you would be effectively running many reverbs at once.

#71

Yep, that’s the one.

I can tell you based on my previous forays that scattered grains as an IR sounds almost exactly as you’d expect! Convolution is commutative, so you can kinda technically reverse the IR and the input and get the same result (only “kinda” because in the audio world we tend to have the kernel/IR as a “discrete” component versus the input audio as a “continuous” component and then listen to the results one sample at a time). Give it a shot: take your synth sample or whatever and cut it down to IR length, then convolve little grains of filtered noise or whatever with it (voices and drums are fun) on the input side. Very vocoder-ish. c1’s sample rate controls make this patch into a tuned resonator kind of setup (though I don’t know if it tracks V/oct).

The length of the kernel matters a lot! As does its enveloping/dynamics. In fact I really, really wish that the c1 had a mode toggle for applying a simple decay envelope to the kernel in the live convolution mode.

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