Building instruments Pt1
This is the first of two blog posts dedicated to documenting and discussing the design of a series of instruments inspired by light. This particular blog post focuses on "Photon Emission" and "Liquid Crystal."
Photon Emission mimics how photons are emitted by atoms when their electrons change energy levels. Beyond the physical analogy, Photon Emission aims to establish the sonic building blocks of a new language to describe light through sound. At its core, Photon Emission is a 64-channel resonator and comb-filter fed by single-sample impulses. Every impulse represents a photon, its energy and persistence in the environment are represented by the resonator's frequency and Q. The way this photon is scattered around the environment is "described" by the diffusion settings.
The patch's five primary parameters (emission density, emission energy, energy jitter, emission persistence and diffusion) are controlled through time-variable curve sequencers. A user can simply click and create a path in time for the parameter to evolve. One would think that this control system would lend itself mainly to generating evolving drones. Although that may be the most immediate possibility to explore, it is not the only one. In fact, it is possible to "freeze" time in these sequencers and create static sounds. And it is further possible to compose complex rhythms by creating "spikes" in the sequencers. One of the latest features I added to the patch is a graphical stereo panner that allows to spatialize each of the 64 voices of the patch easily. This can be done either by choosing some convenient "panning shapes" or by manually moving each voice in the stereo field.
I decided to use a sort of hybrid language for the controls available in the patch so that it would be easy to understand from a musician's point of view but still allow someone to explore these parameters by thinking only about how they relate to light.
After developing "Photon Emission" as more of a general-purpose tool to describe light, I decided to build instruments that tackle more specific lighting contexts. The first instrument I developed with this idea in mind is "Liquid Crystal.
The patch was inspired by how LCDs (Liquid-crystal displays) have become one of the most common ways we interface with digital technology. I imagined the instrument as being a sort of open technical diagram that described how LCDs function and transferred those functions to the realm of sound. The patch's main interactive element is a large slider (rslider in MAX) that can be interacted with using the mouse and using the Shift, Alt and Control/Command keys to modify mouse-click behaviour. This slider controls the overall "colour gamut" of the sounds produced by the patch. There are also controls for the purity of light emitted by the LCDs backlight and its polarisation.
From a technical perspective, the patch controls 144 channels of filtered noise, whose frequency centre is decided by the colour gamut and spread controls. The three polarizers control a series of Distortion units built on the Tanh~ object that implement self-amplitude modulation as a form of pitch-shifting. This novel approach to AM distortion dramatically expands the sonic palette of the otherwise pure tones created by the filtered noise.
