Station Point

Crafting Tune Artifacts

Alien Autopsy Via Sample-Rate Reduction

Posted on | January 6, 2011 | 2 Comments

Here’s a cool sound-design trick. If you want to get a vocal-sound­ing ‘for­mant fil­ter’ effect out of a synth that only has a nor­mal low­pass fil­ter, you can take advan­tage of a quirk of sam­ple-rate reduc­tion effects to gen­er­ate mul­ti­ple “mir­rored” fil­ter sweeps through the won­der of aliasing.

Here’s a sound clip from my machine­drum with a sim­ple saw­tooth note and a res­o­nant low­pass fil­ter being mod­u­lat­ed down over a quick sweep. It’s played four times, each with increas­ing amounts of sam­ple-rate reduc­tion applied:

increas­ing srr

This sam­ple looks like this in a sono­gram (I used the Sono­gram View plu­g­in that Apple includes with XCode). Hor­i­zon­tal axis is time, ver­ti­cal is frequency:

Notice that as the alias­ing (reflect­ed fre­quen­cies) increase with the sam­ple-rate reduc­tion effect, you begin to see mul­ti­ple copies of the fil­ter sweep. This cre­ates the love­ly, com­pli­cat­ed “alien voice” sound. Here’s a short Machine­Drum loop I was play­ing around with when I real­ized what was going on here:

alien-autop­sy-192

And for the Elek­tron-heads read­ing this, here’s the MD sysex for that pattern+kit:
alien-autopsy-md.syx

PS: the wikipedia arti­cle on alias­ing has a good run­down on the details of this phenomenon.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Alien Autopsy Via Sample-Rate Reduction”

  1. JC
    June 7th, 2011 @ 8:20 pm

    Bril­liant.

    Look­ing for a frac­tal syn­the­siz­er I found your pro­cess­ing exper­i­ment (and your juicy soundcloud!)

    Im try­ing to extract some syn­the­sis sound­scapes , aliens or what­ev­er could be inside from inter­ac­tive strange attrac­tors in pro­cess­ing too… lets see what happen.

    Greet­ings from Spain.

  2. google.com
    June 14th, 2014 @ 6:08 am

    whoah this weblog is fan­tas­tic i like read­ing your posts.
    Keep up the great work! You know, many per­sons are search­ing around for this info, you can aid them greatly.

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