This example repeatedly arpgeggiates the first 16 notes of the harmonic series based on the frequency 65.406395 Hz, which is the fundamental frequency of the open C string on a cello. The note rate can be adjusted anywhere from 1 note per second to 100 notes per second. The default initial rate is 8 notes per second.
Did you know that there are several different ways to turn MSP audio on and off in Max?
How do you do something x number of times, then stop?
In music the term vibrato (Italian for “vibrated”) means small repetitive fluctuations of pitch and loudness in a tone. Singers and instrumentalists use vibrato intentionally to add interest and expressivity to their sound.
There’s a simple way to convert one range of values into a corresponding set of values in a different range. The mathematical operations necessary to do that are “scaling” (one multiplication) and “offsetting” (one addition).
The biquad~ object is a biquadratic filter. In technical terms, that’s a second-order IIR filter with two poles and two zeros; in practical terms, it’s a versatile filter that can have a wide variety of characteristics—lowpass, hipass, bandpass, notch, shelf, etc.—depending on the values of the coefficients in the filtering equation. But unless you’re a trained electrical engineer, you probably don’t know exactly how the coefficient values correspond to particular filtering characteristics.
An ADSR envelope generator is a common tool for controlling the amplitude of a note, and in fact it can be used to control any parameter of a sound. In this example, one adsr~ object controls the amplitude of a note while another adsr~ controls the cutoff frequency of a lowpass filter on the sound. Both are triggered at the same moment, but they have slightly different parameters for independent envelope shapes.
The way that a sound’s amplitude evolves over time is called its amplitude envelope.
This example demonstrates how the settings of a resonant bandpass filter can be altered in a rhythmic way for musical effect. The three table objects each contain 16 numbers, which will be used as the parameter settings for gain, center frequency, and Q in a reson~ object. The numbers in the table objects are looked up by a counter that cycles repeatedly through the table indices, 0 to 15.
The reson~ object is a resonant bandpass filter; it passes frequencies in a specified region, and attenuates the other frequencies. It requires only three parameter values: input gain, center (resonated) frequency, and a resonance quality factor (Q). The Q determines the bandwidth of the passed region around the center frequency. Specifically, Q is defined as center frequency divided by bandwidth, where bandwidth is the extent, in Hertz, above and below the center frequency before the frequencies will be significantly attenuated.