Music, Sound, and New Media
Diving into “clipping” in audio, and thinking about the aesthetic possibilities of going beyond the limits of a system.
In this video, I use Audacity and Max/MSP to look at examples of both hard clipping and soft clipping, checking out the harmonic spectra of these distortions and thinking about how we can use clipping as an expressive tool in our compositions or sound design.
Asymmetrical clipping is clipping (truncation of a waveform), where the positive and negative amplitude peaks of a waveform are clipped to different values. This means we could clip the negative at -1, and the positive at -0.8 for example, and create some interesting harmonics.
This asymmetrical clipping is common in guitar effect pedals, since it’s relatively cheap to accomplish in electronics (with a few diodes). Unsurprisingly, it’s pretty easy to accomplish in Pd too, just using the [clip~] object. The fun part comes in deciding how we can use it musically.