Vocal Sample to Oscillator in Symbolic Sound Kyma

Turning a single cycle of a recorded sample into a wavetable for Kyma oscillators.

When composing music with samples, it’s worthwhile to explore all of the musical opportunities in that sample–reversing it, timestretching it, granulating it, etc. Along those same lines, you can take a wavetable fro a sample and use it in your oscillators, so, instead of using the usual sawtooth, square, or sine waves, you create an oscillator that has a timbral connection to the sampled material.

Here, I show how to take take two vowel sounds from a vocal sample–an “ah” and an “oh”–and cycle them in a Kyma oscillator, creating unique timbres that blend with the original sample and its processing.

0:00 Intro / Why?
0:41 Finding a Single Cycle
3:14 Changing Duration to 4096 Samples
4:16 Cycling the Wavetable in an Oscillator
6:33 Making a Different Oscillator Wavetable
9:21 Implementation Example: Chords
11:49 Adding Vibrato
14:08 SampleCloud Plus Chords

More Symbolic Sound Kyma videos:

Pure Data Patch from Scratch: “Complex Oscillator”

A quick and easy Pure Data patch-from-scratch tutorial building a “complex oscillator” with two sine waves cross modulating each others frequency for noisy, sophisticated sounds.

In this patch, we set up a simple FM synthesizer with one sine wave modulating another’s frequency. Then, instead of leaving it there, we take our output and use it to modulate the modulation oscillation, leading some wonderful, unpredictable complex sounds.

There’s no talking on this one, just building the patch, and listening to it go.

0:00 Sine Oscillator
0:42 Simple FM Synthesis
1:50 Cross Modulation
2:37 Commenting the Code
4:11 Exploring the Controls

Pure Data introductory tutorials here.
More no-talking Pure Data jams and patch-from-scratch videos.

Lo-Fi Telephone Microphone

Watch me dissect and old phone and repurpose its carbon microphone.

Constructing a lo-fi microphone from an old telephone’s carbon microphone, and seeing what other parts we can make some sounds with.

I got this old phone at Goodwill for a couple bucks, interested in seeing if it had a carbon microphone that I could salvage. It turns out getting that microphone out was a breeze. Then I started seeing what other parts might be interesting–the keypad, the chip that makes DTMF tones. Finally, I put together the circuit for the carbon microphone, and got it back in the handset, adding a new specialty carbon microphone to my mic locker (such as it is).