Freesound Forums

Lets discuss here your ideas, experiments and results in relation to Dare 26.
Also the place to ask questions and get answers

I just wanted to suggest few tools suitable to produce sound material
for this dare.

Bitmap Player: http://victorx.eu/BitmapPlayer.htm
Sound 2D Warper: http://victorx.eu/SndWarp.htm
Draw The Sound (I use it a lot!): http://victorx.eu/DrawTheSound.htm
Color Tones: http://victorx.eu/ColorTones.htm

Sound designers shouldn't miss this one: http://photosounder.com

Similar to PhotoSounder, but free: http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/ans/

Nice tools!
The "Colours produce stereo output" option of the Bitmap Player can add a lot of life to the sound, and I like how the Sound 2D Warper can easily give the feeling of hardware malfunction or altered perception

Hey guys,

Not sure if this is one that's already been mentioned, but sound hack is something you guys will definitely want to check out!

best,
Lloyd

Guys, this is excellent. Great new toys.
Unfortunately SoundHack is Mac only - so won't help me but will surely help others

If anyone knows of any other programs not yet mentioned here, please post.

AlienXXX wrote:
Unfortunately SoundHack is Mac only - so won't help me but will surely help others

No, it is not

Quote from SoundHack website:
"For version 1.52 of Pvoc Kit, 1.51 of Spectral Shapers and 8.03 of Delay Trio/Freesound, Windows VST plugins are installed in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steinberg\Vstplugins and C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST2."

And I demoed all those plugs myself on my Windows machine.

AlienXXX wrote:
Guys, this is excellent. Great new toys.
If anyone knows of any other programs not yet mentioned here, please post.

GRM Tools - powerful, very powerful plug-ins: http://tinyurl.com/orxyle5

SonicPhoto Gold - Another image sonification tool with advanced sonification options:
http://www.skytopia.com/software/sonicphoto/

Audiobulb Ambient - Standalone granular processor with useful randomization function:
http://www.audiobulb.com/create/Ambient/AB-Ambient.htm

Hourglass - Standalone granular processor with multiple samples loading support
and strong modulation capabilities: http://xenakios.wordpress.com

PitchTech plug-ins - Set of VST FX plug-ins for sound design and sound effects:
http://www.pitchtech.ch/Plugins/index.html

Spear - spectral analysis, modification and resynthesis tool:
http://www.klingbeil.com/spear/

Trebblofang wrote:

Sound 2D Warper: http://victorx.eu/SndWarp.htm

This one is particularly interesting: as it takes us into converting sounds to images, processing the images and then converting back to sound. - a whole sub-chapter... And yes, you can load sounds into Paint Shop Pro or other image processing programs, use image processing tools on them and then convert back to sound again...

Anyway... Another thing I wanted to mention is that these programs are almost exclusively standalone, off-line applications -> they will not integrate with your DAW.
This might feel like going totally oldschool: back to the days when computers did not have the power to do most sound processing operations in real-time...

However, these programs do only one thing (or a few related things), which they tend to do very well. The fact you can't run them along with 15 other plugins at the same time you keep changing the musical piece arrangement in your DAW means you will have no distractions: you will be focused on the sound design only.

Paulstretch works in the same way. - standalone application.
And we already know the kind of awesome results Paulstretch can produce...

@Trebblofang
You are unstoppable !

I expect some great sounds from you for this dare, if you have all of these toys in your toybox!

Thanks!

Mammut - This sound processing tool is sound designers swiss knife:
http://www.notam02.no/web/2005/10/mammut-2/?lang=en
I've used it to produce a large part of my Freesound samples.

Generative and Feedback - two standalone granular sound processors:
http://www.sirenaudio.co.uk/softwaregallery.php

Granite - powerful granular synthesizer:
http://www.newsonicarts.com/html/granite.php

Spectrobits - very versatile VST synth with drawable bitmap
"oscillators" (in fact this is onboard image sonification engine):
http://www.g200kg.com/en/software/spectrobits.html

I see spectrobits synth as particularly interesting - it is instantly rewarding tool, producing
various sci-fi or "radiophonic" sounds just by few brush strokes. Highly recommended.

Trebblofang wrote:
Spectrobits - very versatile VST synth with drawable bitmap
"oscillators" (in fact this is onboard image sonification engine):
http://www.g200kg.com/en/software/spectrobits.html

I see spectrobits synth as particularly interesting - it is instantly rewarding tool, producing
various sci-fi or "radiophonic" sounds just by few brush strokes. Highly recommended.

Which makes it similar in a way to this one I suggested on the Dare thread:
http://www.kvraudio.com/developer_challenge_2009.php
Please note the plugin I mean is Harsh Digital Nose (by insertpizhere). There is a lot of other stuff in this link.

However, I do not think that plugin does the usual thing of taking the picture as a time-frequency representation of the sound. I think this one just converts individual pixel intensities into a waveform.

AlienXXX wrote:
However, I do not think that plugin does the usual thing of taking the picture as a time-frequency representation of the sound. I think this one just converts individual pixel intensities into a waveform.

Yes, it is different - it seems to me that it analyses also bitmap colors (color choice is
possible in tools menu).
This make it similar to another "audiographical" tool, HighC, which uses
hand-drawn forms as kind of "notation" to drive its oscillators (including those
based on user-supplied samples): http://highc.org

[removed]

Guys and girls

Although all the tools presented here are interesting and I encourage you to try as many of them as you fell like, some are not really in the spirit of this dare.

This one, for example:

Trebblofang wrote:
Another useful tool

Sound effects generator, LabChirp: http://labbed.net/software.php?id=labchirp

Let's connect databending with image sonification

1) get free Stitch'n'Glitch (works for Windows/Mac/Linux, so it is quite universal)
2) destroy some graphics with Stitch'n'Glitch
3) feed glitchy output to one of image sonification programs already mentioned in this thread

Trebblofang wrote:
Let's connect databending with image sonification

1) get free Stitch'n'Glitch (works for Windows/Mac/Linux, so it is quite universal)
2) destroy some graphics with Stitch'n'Glitch
3) feed glitchy output to one of image sonification programs already mentioned in this thread

Also, for those with audacity, why not import an image as raw data into Audacity and also into one of the image-to-sound programs suggested in this thread so far. - Basically you get two very different sounds from the same image:
- raw data into Audacity is databending
- image into a program like audiopaint is image-to-sound conversion

What we need now is some examples...

Anyone care to upload their experiments? Please tag with "dare-26"

Greetings! Just thought I'd throw in my 2 cents.

These may not be Standalone, but I've had interesting results with them on several occasions. Experimental wise, that is..

Pretty much all of these effects have something to offer if you like grit.
http://numerisson.com/novaflash/vst/freefall/

The Anarchy Effects Bundle use to cost money but is now free and capable manipulating sounds into a mutated frenzy of who knows what.
http://www.anarchy-rhythms.com/

hey, got some good results importing photoshop files into audacity, have a listen:
http://www.freesound.org/people/jeffercake/sounds/222568/

Been working on creating spectrograms, editing them as images in photoshop, and the re-synthesising them. Will post up the results shortly.

jeffercake wrote:
hey, got some good results importing photoshop files into audacity, have a listen:
http://www.freesound.org/people/jeffercake/sounds/222568/