Nathan Ho (Posts about virtual analog)

Matrix Modular Synthesis

Nathan Ho — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 20:39:09 GMT

Today’s blog post is about a feedback-based approach to experimental sound synthesis that arises from the union of two unrelated inspirations.

Inspiration 1: Buchla Music Easel

The Buchla Music Easel is a modular synthesizer I’ve always admired for its visual appearance, almost more so than its sound. I mean, look at it! Candy-colored sliders, knobs, and banana jacks! It has many modules that are well explored in this video by Under the Big Tree, and its standout features in my view are two oscillators (one a “complex oscillator” with a wavefolder integrated), two of the famous vactrol-based lowpass gates, and a five-step sequencer. The video I linked says that “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts” with the Easel – I’ll take his word for it given the price tag.

The Music Easel is built with live performance in mind, which encompasses live knob twiddling, live patching, and playing the capacitive touch keyboard. Artists such as Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith have used this synth to create ambient tonal music, which appears tricky due to the delicate nature of pitch on the instrument. Others have created more out-there and noisy sounds on the Easel, which offers choices between built-in routing and flexible patching between modules and enables a variety of feedback configurations for your bleep-bloop-fizz-fuzz needs.

Resource: "The Tube Screamer's Secret"

Nathan Ho — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 16:50:01 GMT

A few years ago I bookmarked Boğaç Topaktaş’ 2005 article titled “The Tube Screamer’s Secret,” but today I was dismayed to discover that the domain had expired. This ensures that the page is now nearly impossible to find unless you already know the URL. I don’t normally make posts that are just a link to a third party, but this valuable resource might be forgotten otherwise. Here’s the page in the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180127031808/http://bteaudio.com/articles/TSS/TSS.html

Low Battery Audio Effects

Nathan Ho — Mon, 25 May 2020 07:00:00 GMT

Searching YouTube for videos of low battery toys and keyboards brings up results like “Demon Possessed Singing Trout.” Please watch the video before proceeding.

I have a limited understanding of electronics, but a compulsory need to explain this phenomenon due to tech blogger ego syndrome. A low battery has an abnormally high internal resistance, causing its voltage to sag in response to the loads it’s supporting. If it’s powering multiple things, they will interact in strange ways. The distorted audio from the singing fish sounds like the clock rate is dropping in reaction to the load of the speaker. (The servo motors might also be causing voltage sag, although it isn’t entirely clear from the video.)

The speaker/clock interaction is interesting since it works in a feedback loop: the clock controls the playback rate, and the amplitude of the output audio draws current that affects the clock. This inspires a general method for turning an audio algorithm into a “low battery” version:

Run a DSP algorithm such as sample playback, synthesizer, effect, etc. that can be operated at a variable clock rate.
Apply filters like a full-wave rectifier, envelope follower, or simple lowpass to simulate speaker load. Optional.
Apply a highpass filter to block dc. (This helps prevent the algorithm from getting stuck.)
Use this signal to control the clock rate of the DSP algorithm, so that a signal of higher amplitude lowers the clock rate.

The casual experiments I’ve done with this are promising. At subtle settings, this creates wandering, droopy pitch bends. Pushed to the extreme, it produces squelchy signal-dependent distortion. I especially like its effect on percussive signals, where louder transients are stretched out and any rhythmic pulse becomes irregular. I’m imagining software plugins that emulate digital hardware could be augmented with a “battery” knob that lets the user control how much the clock rate sags in response to the output signal.

An Analog-Style Frequency Shifter

Nathan Ho — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 08:00:00 GMT

In this post, I will give an overview of a well-known method for designing frequency shifter effects in analog electronics, and some notes on implementing a digital version.

Frequency shifting is a special case of single sideband (SSB) modulation, a device often used in radio electronics. SSB in telecommunications involves shifting audio frequencies by e.g. 10 MHz so they can be transmitted as radio waves, then shifting down 10 MHz at the receiver. For this reason, SSB is well-studied, and there are a few different ways to implement it. This post describes a design that has found use in electronic music applications, where the shift is small (up to ±20 kHz, and often in tiny shifts like 1 Hz). Wikipedia calls it a “Hartley modulator,” but I can’t find any source to corroborate that terminology.

A fantastic reference to look at for the design of an analog frequency shifter is [Haible1996], which provides a full set of schematics of a high-quality real-world analog unit. I’ll only provide details up to an abstract block diagram that can be easily digitized.

This post starts off pretty theoretical, with an attempt to explain how the frequency shifter works. Admittedly, this is an explanation more for myself than it is for others, but I hope it helps. If not, feel free to skip the first two sections and check out the following links which might explain it better: [Smith2007] [Boschen2016] [Boschen2020]