This is commonplace now, but then it was just being tried out. And the nice thing about those early MIDI effects is that often a lot of parameters were mapped directly to MIDI inputs, so we were modulating a lot of things via computer-generated MIDI. It was at a point where things were just evolving beyond the modular synthesis of the 1970s, so many of the effects we used still had voltage control inputs as well as MIDI. And in that particular time, effects are fairly well developed, and most of them had MIDI control.
![soundhack freesound soundhack freesound](https://freesound.org/data/displays/458/458092_9578779_wave_L.png)
Once you get in the studio – in this case a multitrack analogue studio – if you have any interest in those sounds at all, you feel like playing with effects. So I was certainly aware of this general concept of ‘studio as instrument’ for most of my life. These are the types of sounds that caught my ears early on in my experience of listening. At times it’s more forceful, at times not even in very early Les Paul songs you can hear things that could only happen in the studio, like double speed guitar.
![soundhack freesound soundhack freesound](http://fdxsound.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cropped-audio-3817292_1920-1-1024x683.jpg)
I mean, ‘studio as instrument’ is a concept that people kick around so often – you really listen to any pop music in the 1960s and 1970s and you can hear the studio entering into the music. I’m not prepared for this kind of question!. Where did that concept come from for you – what kind of an instrument is a studio? Is it a musical instrument, a scientific instrument, an instrument for performance? TG: Yes, I was going to ask about this – in the article you write that this work was informed by the studio as instrument concept. Tom Erbe: Well, to address the first part of your question, David Rosenboom and I were in the studio for maybe two months just experimenting with effects and with getting unique sonic landscapes for each character, so we were encouraged to really freely do things with whatever equipment we had – we had mostly live equipment.
#SOUNDHACK FREESOUND SOFTWARE#
And the third section is when you discuss the shift from plugins as standalone software to, for lack of a better term, ‘modular synthesis’. The first section talks about the origins of SoundHack in terms of the specific project you were working on – Robert Ashley’s Improvement – and the technological and cultural landscapes in which you were working. bandwidth, central frequency, feedback, and modulator parameters can be adjusted.Theodore Gordon: I think I had the most questions about the first and the third sections of your article.
![soundhack freesound soundhack freesound](https://cdn.rekkerd.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/soundhack_bubbler_thumb.jpg)
++phasor is a multistage phase shifter that has outputs for 360, 720, 11 phase shifting (1, 2, 4 and 8 notch). for mid-side microphone arrays, but also useful when needing to apply effects to only the center or the sides of a stereo mix. ++matrix is a mid-side to left-right encoder and decoder. useful for adding harshness, distortion and brightness to any sound. ++decimate uses bit depth and sample rate reduction for added aliasing and decimation noise. it also has a variable width level detection window (response). It has a softknee control as well as a switchable rms/peak level detector. ++compand is a combined compressor/expander plugin.
![soundhack freesound soundhack freesound](https://freesound.org/data/displays/433/433631_7545291_spec_L.jpg)
This can be used to make a sound gently saturated (3rd chebyshev polynomial), harshly distorted (7th chebyshev polynomial) or like a dying amplifier (2nd or 4th chebyshev polynomials). ++chebyshev A distortion unit which uses several low-order chebyshev polynomials to add even or odd harmonic distortion. The Freesound bundle is a collection of VST/AAX/AU, Mac/Windows plugins that I have developed while teaching music programming at UCSD and CalArts.