A long day spent doing a small and simple thing. I wanted to make a new sound for the opening of The Infinite Forest and wanted something gritty and organic and noisy, something deep and mysterious with a technologcal edge. I started with some of the noise effects I've programmed but realised that I could combine three of these effects into one, so I've created a new audio effect called Hypernoise:
This generates random noise, not every sample (that would be simple white noise) but every so-many samples, initially at the same rate as one wavelength (eg. 261.63hz when the note is middle C). This noise is created in solid blocks of this length. The 'Input' parameter also allows you to use data from the existing sound, so the effect can be used to quantise a sample, destroy its resolution. With this noise you can either play it (Add) or use it to modulate (Multiply) the current sound, and you can fade away the current sound (with Dry) to keep only the modulated or raw noise. Of course, it's pitched so you can play a tune with it. The 'Fq. Ratio' parameter is tuning; you can set it to 2 or 4 or 8 to turn it up an octave or three. You get some really interesting effects with very low numbers (it will actually go to zero, which means it generates one initial sample of 'noise' and keeps it at that level).
The 'Smooth' parameter interpolates between these harsh castellations of sound, so smoothing everything along.
I couldn't decide if mono or stereo (well, mono or hexio, Prometheus uses six channels natively) would be better, I expect mono will be most useful, but I've made two versions.
Once that was made I created my sound. In the end I didn't use the white noise I'd anticipated, but used a reversed diesel train and some wind chimes, both heavilty distorted and filtered and slowed down (and noised). The result sounds like a war torn post-apocalyptic landscape.
Prometheus crashed again with an old bug. It's so rare that for a year it didn't crash at all, a perhaps 1 in 1000 chance. I've coded in a few traps for it. I'm feeling very anxious and stressed. My body feels like knots of high pressure which I must try to dissipate. Have just been for a nice walk in the heavy rain of Storm Christoph and did some outdoor singing practice while doing so. When I returned, my gloves were so soaked that I rang out about a cup or water from them before entering the house. No other romantic geniuses were walking in the storm.
