Because of the phase cancellation effect caused when a sound is mixed with a delayed copy of itself, the resonance or attenuation (strengthening or weakening) of the frequencies caused by that delay is heavily dependent on the delay time. If a sinusoidal component of a sound is delayed by exactly one cycle (i.e., one period, i.e.
This patch shows how you might combine several of the abstractions that are presented in other examples. The two key abstractions here are tapoutxfade~ and quadpan~. Those are not actual Max objects; they're both patches that have been saved with those names.
A named record~ object records audio data into the buffer~ object that shares the same name. When the record~ object receives the message 1 (or any nonzero number) it begins recording the audio signal it receives, by placing that data in the associated buffer~, starting at the beginning of the buffer~. When record~ receives a 0 message, it stops recording.
This example is essentially the same as "Basic RAM recording into buffer~", except that it's designed for recording and playing back a stereo signal instead of a single channel of audio. The buffer~ object has an additional argument to specify 2 channels of storage.
To record a sound into RAM, you must first allocate/designate a place in RAM into which to record. The buffer~ object creates a named buffer in memory large enough to store the specified duration of audio data. In this example, the buffer is named "theholdingplace" and holds up to 60,000 milliseconds (one minute) of audio. The incoming audio signal from the adc~ object goes into a record~ object that refers to that memory buffer.
Relevant to the musical applications of cellular automata, this is a patch that controls a bank of 128 oscillators based on the on-off state of a row of cells in a Jitter matrix that is generated by some very simple rules of a cellular automaton.
A single sample value of 1 (surrounded on either side by sample values of 0) is the shortest possible sound that can be represented in a digital audio signal. Electrical engineers call this signal an impulse. It theoretically contains every frequency up to the Nyquist frequency (one-half the sample rate), so it’s useful for testing filters and for determining the mathematical formulae to describe different sorts of filtering effects.
A sinusoid added to a delayed version of itself will result in a sinusoid of the same frequency but with its amplitude altered. The amount of amplitude change will depend on the phase relationship between the original sinusoid and its delayed copy. The two sinusoids will interfere with each other either constructively (reinforcing each other) or destructively (tending to cancel each other).