Hello everyone,
I am trying to recreate Michael Norris’ Spectral Freeze (Soundmagic Spectral - Michael Norris, Composer). My thought process was that I could use:
PV_Freeze to freeze the spectrum
PV_RandPhase (third party and had to build it) to randomize the phases
PV_Cutoff to filter out the high frequencies.
This kind of works, but not really. Norris’ spectral freeze continues to gather new audio as the freeze is in place. The duration of the freeze can be controlled with a “freeze amount” parameter. The PV_Freeze done by supercollider holds the freeze of that analysis window until re-triggered. So, unless you re-trigger at some rate, you can’t accumulate the past into the future. To solve this problem I tried to feedback the IFFT and add it back in to the FFT along with the new input while re-triggering the spectral freeze. This is better, but somehow there is some rhythmic pulsing where I just want a frozen spectrum.
SynthDef("spectralFreeze", { arg inputBus=10, freezeAmt, binCutoff = -0.9, bufnum, wet=1.0;
var local, input, fft, freeze, diffuse, brickWall, ifft;
local = LocalIn.ar(1);
input = In.ar(inputBus);
fft = FFT(bufnum, input + (local*freezeAmt), 0.5);
freeze = PV_Freeze(fft, Impulse.ar(1/(2.pow(16)))); // try to trigger per window size
diffuse = PV_RandPhase(freeze);
brickWall = PV_Cutoff(diffuse, binCutoff);
ifft = IFFT.ar(brickWall);
LocalOut.ar(ifft);
Out.ar(0, ifft.dup*wet + ((1.0 - wet) * input));
}).add;
c = Synth("soundIn");
d = Synth("spectralFreeze", [\freezeAmt, 1.0, \binCutoff, -0.9, \bufnum, ~fftBuffer], c, \addAfter);
Here is what I want things to sound like:
Here is what they actually sound like:
Any ideas?
One hint might be this bit of writing from Michael Norris:
In this effect, we take a number of analysis ‘windows’ from the start of the selected sound, and ‘freeze’ those sounds in time. The analyses are simply kept in memory, and then replayed in a random walk fashion (ie from one window to a neighbouring window), throughout the duration of the remainder of the selection. You can also specify the ‘freeze amount’, which is the percentage of the original spectrum which can be heard through the frozen sound-file.
I’m not sure if this is still true with the modern version of the plugin, since the number of analysis windows is not longer a parameter you can set. I’m not sure how one could keep analysis windows and perform a random walk through them in the PV ugen world.