Sound from a Virtual Planet

We often think about technology in terms of new features, capabilities, or techniques. In electronic music that translates into the quest for products that offer new synthesis techniques or unique implementations of existing ones. It’s something I like to call the "secret weapon syndrome." (More on this in a later entry…) In all this, we often forget the user interface –how we work with a particular tool. This is probably the least sexy topic one could raise when considering a product, yet when you come right down to it, it’s probably one of the most important. It’s really what determines if you’re going to open something occasionally, or if you’re going to use it every day.

I always look forward to checking out new synths, and my interest in Circle from Future Audio Workshop started when it was first announced at Musikmesse this past spring. One of the big selling points for this synth was it’s user interface… so, what’s up with that? The basic premise here is that sound design is really an easy process and that the instruments you use should be easy to understand and use. FAW is a collective of programmers from across Europe led by Gavin Burke with headquarters in Ireland. While Circle uses a standard subtractive architecture, the instrument was designed from the ground up to clarify the workflow of using the instrument. There’s a great interview with Gavin on the Create Digital Music (CDM) website that provides some insight into the instrument’s design and the thinking behind it.

I use synthesizers to design sounds as well as to teach and learn about the techniques involved. Circle excels at both. One of the most confusing aspects of sound design can be modulation routings. In modular systems, this is done using patch cables. While these systems make a clear visual connection between a source and destination, things can get confusing when there are many routings, and the patch starts to look like a spaghetti dinner. Anyone who’s worked with the Nord Modular or done any patching on the back of the Reason rack can attest to this. There are five possible internal modulation sources in Circle, and any of these can be configured as an envelope, LFO, or a step sequencer. Each source is color coded, and to make a connection you simply drag a colored circle to the desired destination. In a fully formed patch, it’s very easy to see exactly what is controlling any destination.

A big part of interface design is consistency. Synthesizer controls generally fall under one of two categories, amounts and levels or durations. In Circle, you click and drag up to increase a level, drag down to decrease. Simple, yes? We most often see time values in setting the duration of an envelope segment. Here, it’s done by simply dragging to the right to make the duration longer, left makes it shorter. You can contrast this with the vertical sliders used for envelope controls in many hardware and software instruments such as Reason’s Subtractor. This is consistent throughout Circle except for the rate control in the built-in arpeggiator which is controlled with a horizontal slider.

While sound is an aural experience, we can learn a lot about what we’re hearing through visual displays. In Circle, the motion of LFO waveforms is clearly displayed. While there is a healthy selection of sixteen LFO waveshapes, each LFO section allows two separate shapes to be combined into a single composite again, clearly displayed. In the envelopes, a ball traces the progress through the timed segments. In the step sequencer, progress through the steps is outlined as each colored step turns white as it plays. While these may seem like obvious features, they are things that you aren’t typically seeing in other software instruments, making Circle very easy to use.

Behind the user interface, there’s a very robust subtractive architecture with some twists. There’s quite a variety of timbral possibilities in Circle, beyond the geometric basics, using the oscillators in wavetable mode. In each of these, two waves can be combined, similar to what we see in the LFOs. While the envelopes in Circle are standard ADSR shapes, step sequenced control and the variety of waveforms available for periodic LFO control makes it possible to create the kind of rhythmic patterns one gets from the multisegment envelopes in synths from Native Instruments.

So what’s on the frontier for electronic instruments? It very well could come from the kind of thinking behind this first offering from Future Audio Workshop. I can only imagine what may come from future products that use more complex synthesis architectures. FM made simple anyone?

For some time we’ve taken pitch transposition and time-stretching of audio for granted, with one caveat; only an entire audio signal gets processed. We’ve come to expect programs like Ableton Live and now Pro Tools to treat audio like butter, speeding up and slowing down loops, time correcting sloppy drumming and pitch correcting the wanna-be diva. The Waterloo of this technology has traditionally been isolating events within an audio file. If a singer hits the wrong note, it’s usually not a problem to correct, since it’s a single monophonic event that can be easily isolated and processed. What about when the piano player hits the wrong note in a chord? Well, that’s another take…. We’ve always operated under this assumption, and it was a great reason to record performances as MIDI data, since we had the freedom to freely manipulate individual notes a chord.

All this changed last week at Musikmesse, Germany’s massive musical instrument trade show, when Celemony debuted their Direct Note Access (DNA) technology. DNA can analyze an audio event, isolate individual pitched elements, and freely manipulate them in pitch and time. While I’ve said that changes in music technology products are often evolutionary, not revolutionary, this is a really big one.

Celemony started in 2001 with the initial release of Melodyne, the brainchild of German programming whiz Peter Neubäcker. The whole idea behind the technology was to allow users to edit the pitch and timing of a note graphically. Melodyne does this by analyzing the source and displaying the result as graphic data on a pitch and time grid. From here, the audio properties can be manipulated much like note and controller data in a MIDI sequencer’s graphic editing window. Opcode first introduced this concept in the late 1990’s with their StudioVision sequencer. Here, monophonic audio performances were analyzed and represented as MIDI note and pitchbend data. You simply edited the MIDI data, and rendered the result back to an audio file. Melodyne expands on this, bypassing MIDI altogether and greatly enhancing the resulting sound quality.

Melodyne is available in a variety of products from the entry level Melodyne Uno to the flagship Melodyne Studio. Starting in Fall 2008 with version 2 of the Melodyne plug-in, Direct Note Access will be incorporated into their full line and perhaps inspire some interesting new products.

Peter Neubäcker freely admits that he assumed extending the Melodyne model to individual note events in a chord was not possible. Only after challenging this basic assumption did the algorithms behind this begin to take shape. The DNA acronym works, since Direct Note Access is really about exploring the genome of the harmonic life of music. While the demo video is truly amazing, keep in mind that the types of performances here illustrate what may be the best case scenario for effectively using this technology. There are limits, and one wonders if DNA could root out a wrong note in a dense, orchestral recording. Still, what Celemony has come up with is nothing short of remarkable.