This is the first post in hopefully what might become a series in the long run about useful AI applications for music, meant for people who are not coders or data scientists. First, we’ll look at a very useful case: automatic (high quality!) separation of music to stems.
Outer Limits is a set of experimental tools and sound generators for Bitwig 4 and above. It includes 40+ highly specialised chains mostly based on the Grid. There’s not a lot of curated packs of presets for Bitwig around, so here’s a place to start!
Originally I have been creating these sounds for my own use, but since there’s been a bit of interest, I went through the (considerable) trouble of cleaning and setting everything up for a proper release.
There’s a glitch sequencer, additive and phase deformation synthesizers, pitch trackers, faux-analog saturation and dynamics tools, and so on.
I finally got a grip on myself and decided to fix the various problems the site has had for over a decade or so. Everything is now hosted on a dedicated server so I’m in full control. All of the broken links to the older albums should be fixed now. In the sound design and music tutorials there’s still a few missing files, but mostly everything should work by now.
It’s also, incidentally, the 20th anniversary of our (I’m still using the plural, although no one else has been active since 2006/7, because I don’t think nobody ever quit) website.
I know many people are interested in this, and especially under Linux there’s not a lot of choice in commercial tools, so I decided to write this tutorial.
First of all, I want to say that in general I’m quite critical of tools like this for studio monitoring. No amount of corrective filtering can change the mass-spring characteristics of a headphone driver element. But I do believe that it can be useful to give at least more perspective. I assume that people reading this will know what headphone correction means, so I’m not going into any discussion on the fundamentals here.
The AutoEq project uses various freely available headphone measurement data to automatically calculate correction settings for both parametric and static-band EQ devices. It also creates impulse responses for convolution processing.
Continue reading Audio crafting #9 – Headphone correction with native Bitwig tools
The title says it all. Audius is a quite promising new streaming service. I’m not sure how relevant the whole basis on a blockchain is, and what real world problems it’s realistically solving, but the fact is that for now it’s the only service I know of where an artist can get his or her music streamed in high quality 320kbps for free, without any upload time limits.
I have uploaded most of my released music there already, enjoy!
About four or five years ago I felt strongly, that the Aavepyörä sound has dominated my musical output too strongly, and that I was getting stuck in the same manners.
I laid the project to rest in my mind (for now) and embarked on a journey of exploration of musical and signal processing theory and all sorts of weird sound experiments.
This album grew out of those experiments, during a period of around three and half years. Much of that time I could concentrate on sound full-time, and it was very liberating to just keep experimenting without thinking all the time about finishing anything. New ideas grow when there’s space for them. I lived outside the city next to a national park and conserved forests, and almost every day I went into the woods just to listen to the sounds of nature and let my thought processes flow free.
I realised I want to distance this music completely from my old artist persona as Aavepyörä, so I started a new project. I call it Kadonneet maat, which translates as: “Lost Lands”. These are visions of a post-anthropocenic world, where humankind lives in balance with nature. They are also stories of the downfall before that. Beyond those two concepts, the idea of Lost Lands is to me the lost and forgotten myths and stories of all the places and people of whom even no memory remains. In a geological timeframe, even the continents will be turned over, and everything we know will be truly lost. We live in the lost lands of future. And despite all this, life will go on in it’s own peculiar, insistent, numerous and beautiful ways.
Now I am back to the city, the father of a son, and working full-time, so spending such wasteful amounts of time is not possible. First of all, this album will be a beautiful reminder of those free years for me, and secondly, I have now a new kind of fresh and strong basis on which to build ideas on. I already have ideas for several completely different albums, but considering how busy life is, I won’t be doing such incredibly detailed and finely crafted album anytime soon. So it’s entirely possible some more immediate dance styled music might be next on my list… I’m very interested in experimenting with the combination of Bitwig and my analog gear through CV, as well as doing remasters and remixes of some of my old material.
But right now, I need a rest, and I can enjoy this moment of emptiness and achievement which comes when a big project is finished. Such moments are not altogether that common for creative people, so I’ll try not to start on a new album too soon. This means that my friends might get a phone call from me, various things around the house might get fixed, and most of all I can get some sleep at night for a change 🙂
Enjoy!
With microtonal music the sound of intervals and chords can be more or less dissonant or alien-sounding. Partly this is due to us being used to hearning acoustic music in 12-TET, with timbres that almost without exception share the same harmonic series. The acronym stands for twelve tone equal temperament, where each octave is divided into twelve equal steps. The temperament has has dominated western music for the last hundred years or so. Before that all music was in practice tempered some way, to make chords and intervals more consonant for any given peformance.
Let’s venture deeper into the territory though, and look at the effect the harmonic series has on different tunings and scales. We shall construct a completely novel harmonic series based on the golden ratio instead of the usual integral series. We will also adapt our tuning so that the new timbre can be played consonantly. It will sound like this:
Download the project from here, if you just want to hear the sounds or use the additive synth.
Continue reading Audio crafting #8 – Xentonal and Xenharmonic tutorial for Bitwig 3.1+
After nearly 20 years, I found I started making music as Summamutikka again. Here is the first release, a few no-nonsense 90s style goa trance tracks. 100% of the profts go to support Survival International and their work towards indigenous communities around the world.
In this tutorial, we will learn how to calculate semitone values for the individual partials in the harmonic series, and create a filter effect based on this, as well as modify this effect so that we can remove partials at will from sounds.
The tutorial assumes knowledge of Bitwig’s basic functionality.
Continue reading Audio crafting #7 – Harmonic effects for Bitwig 2.x
Originally this was just an experiment that got a bit out of hand, but eventually I found the instrument to be so useful to me that I went through the considerable trouble of cleaning it up for release.
Continue reading Audio crafting #6 – Poly modal impulse resonator synth for Bitwig 2.5