As part of the ‘Management Strategies & Entrepreneurship’ unit in the final year of my degree, I was required to thoroughly research, plan, and put forward a proposition for a contract to develop a virtual drum instrument. The assignment proved challenging, but incredibly useful, introducing me to skills and business acumen relevant to the music and audio technology industry. The contract tender document can be downloaded here. It should be noted that all contracts, entities, or companies appearing in this work are fictitious and included purely for assignment purposes.
Twinthesis is a MaxMSP patch I designed to explore the ‘sound’ of twitter, in an attempt to sonify the human randomness being generated on the service. This post is a quick overview of the synthesis engine, as well as a quick video outlining the features and concepts behind the patch. You can then download the synthesiser as a Mac application.
The aims of this project, are to create a synthesiser capable of both additive and granular synthesis using live tweets to generate and manipulate the sound. The synthesiser currently calls twitter once every 30 seconds, so a new tweet is used to generate the sound every 30 seconds. The synthesis engine, has an element of performance to it, and can be used to create experimental music. An example of experimental music created by the synthesis engine is here:
A full scientific paper and report can be downloaded about twinthesis, detailing aspects of how the patch works, and certain constraints of the project in it’s current state. Please note, this synthesiser is still in development and can be considered an experimental BETA version as released below. On a Mac the sound defaults to the ‘core-audio built in output’ at the moment.
As always, I appreciate all your interest in this project and am more than happy to answer any questions you may have, either in the comments below or via the contact page. I am also willing to share the MaxMSP patches upon request.
The following project was to fully design and implement a vibrato plugin for Cubase using Steinberg’s VST SDK. The plugin is programmed in the C++ language and is provided here for you to download. You have the option of downloading just the .dll plugin file (which is all you need to use the plugin), but I have chosen to provide a version which contains the source code project (Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 format) and the initial algorithm modelling (in MaxMSP format).
The full download also contains the VST SDK 2.4 but is referenced to locally, so you should not need to install and configure the SDK to view the working project. Please note that the SDK is completely owned by Steinberg, and I have not made any modifications to the development kit for use within this project. Below are the links to the downloadable files, including the software manual for the plugin.
To install the plugin for use within Cubase, simply copy the file “Vibrato.dll” to the following Directory…
"C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase Studio 5\VSTPlugins"
This directory may be different depending on your current operating system or version of Cubase. Please see the software manual for more detailed system requirements and installation instructions. This work was produced as a second year assignment for Bournemouth University, please feel free to use the example and learn from the source code but please don’t try and pass it off as your own work.
As always, thank you for your interest in my development work. Any comments, suggestions, or feedback are always welcomed in the comments below or via the Contact Me form.
This post contains a video demonstrating a flash application I created in the first year of study at Bournemouth University. The brief was for a simple tutorial based application developed in Adobe Flash, to demonstrate key principles of digital SLR photography. My application exceeded the expectations for the assignment, and i received a grade of 98% for this piece of work, please feel free to watch the video below.
The application was developed entirely in Adobe Flash, I created the graphic elements using Adobe Photoshop, and all photographs were taken by me specifically for this project. The application makes use of both standard animation techniques as well as action script code, and object orientated programming. I have been further developing this application and intend to release it for free in the near future.
The brief for this piece of work was to create a promotional video on a subject of your choice. I chose to promote the course I am studying at Bournemouth University. This video was shot in pairs, and over half an hour of footage was edited and mixed to fit into a strict 2 minute time slot. The video is embedded below and is hosted on youtube.
The video was shot and edited in 1080p high definition video, all editing and sound design was performed using Final Cut Pro, and Soundtrack Pro.
Please note, the embedded video is only 360p resolution. You can click through to youtube to view the 720p HD version. This work was produced in my first year at Bournemouth University.
This report is an initial investigation into the differences in RMS amplitude between professional and amateur recordings. It was an investigation I conducted in my second year of studies at Bournemouth University. It had been mentioned to me by many industry professionals that the use of compression to boost a tracks volume was becoming more and more apparent in modern day studio recordings. I wanted to find some proof of this, and so i undertook the study comparing professional and amateur recordings. The investigation is available to view and download below.
Please feel free to use the investigation and reference to it if applicable, but do bear in mind that this was produced as part of a university assessment and certain constraints were applied, these are detailed fully within the document. Finally, this report should be viewed as a preliminary investigation only, due to the small sample sizes used for analysis.
