A slower day yesterday. I programmed a new audio effect I've named a Crusher, whish was supposed to be a sort of resolution destroyer, quantising the amplitude into sinusoidal bands, but I erred in the formula and made something that sounds rather amazing. It's technically a 'wave shaper', but that can mean anything. With certain settings it produces the same results as a 'wave folder'. Generally it distorts many samples. At extreme settings it turns a sine wave into white noise, and can turn a saw wave into a sine wave and a million things between.
In MODX programming I've been studying the controllers, the knobs, which are confusingly assigned to Parts, then those assignments are assigned to Performances, even though we only ever play Performances. More over-engineering and inefficiency. There is nothing this system can do that one, Performance-based, rank of controllers would, except things which aren't possible to use in practice (we could assign all 8 knobs to different aspects of a Part, but have none of those do anything on a Performance level). My critique of the frustratingly inefficient design apart, this synthesizer sounds amazing, a paragon of electronic instruments that exceeds anything from the past century I've yet heard.
Today I'm programming a new effect called Proteus which can, simply, play a sample forwards or backwards at any speed while setting any start/end loop points. Any of those parameters can be modulated to create some wild effects. The problem is, the anti-aliased backwards play is proving difficult to code correctly, the calculation of fractional samples and reverse loops. All pointers are fractional, which creates some programming challenges. In an array of, say, 100 samples the data is accessed as a number [0] to [99], but with a fractional pointer, a pointer of 99.9 is valid, so must be allowed for, and, in fact, calculated exactly or the music will simply not play correctly.
I've also fitted the steel brackets for B's garden fence.
In art, I'm mulling ideas. I have two ideas for concept albums/sonatas sketched out. One a revisitation of the Dark Hyperborea project, and the other a tale of lost love which needs some found love to warm it.
