Fragment - Granular/Additive soundscapes & pixels-based delay

Published on Dec 10, 2017 Fragment Synthesizer

"Fragment is an online collaborative additive / spectral / granular live-coding web. platform, the spectrum is created by a live GPU script, the generated visual is then converted to audio by an additive/granular/spectral process.

Fragment is a programmable noise-of-all-kinds software and excel at sound design by combining two of the most powerful synthesis process with a live coding aspect, Fragment also excel at visuals.

This is a video of a live additive + granular ambient soundscapes session which demonstrate pixels-based delay and the soon to be released update of the improved granular synthesis/sound engine.

The video also demonstrate some kind of "vector based synthesis" by using a XY widget in Open Stage Control (through OSC) with the 4 channels volume mapped onto the widget axis resulting in cross-fading of the 4 channels.

The sound in this video is produced by 4 audio server instances (distributed synthesis) on a single i7 6700 machine, the overall CPU load can be seen on the top left corner along with number of partials for each channels, the load generally sit around 5% with peak at ~30% @28:00.

Most of the sounds heard in this video has a delay applied with a simple pixels-based delay (4 lines) which mean that the delay come from Fragment, not from the DAW, this delay can be heard on several sections and can be differentiated by its parameters being tweaked, notably around @22:00.

The granular synthesis engine was battle-tested and improved, many bugs were fixed resulting in big improvement on the sound quality, moreover pitch shifting is now implemented with linear resampling.

The audio server was also improved and is now able to drop frames meaning that if the client is too late sending its pixels frames, the audio server compensate by retaining its last state, this improve the audio quality greatly when few frames are dropped, which is to be expected with browser reflow or high load, frames drop can be heard extensively in videos previously released, there is now near zero audio issues due to frames drop.

The update should be released this month.

9 samples are loaded and used in this video, all of them are single sounds of real or virtual instruments.

The videos used for the visuals are :

SEASONS of NORWAY - A Time-Lapse Adventure in 8K

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v2L2...

Yosemite HD II

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwzY1...

Some amount of reverb/delay effect is added inside Renoise DAW, MIDI sequences are coming from Renoise.

You can try the Fragment synthesizer now at : https://www.fsynth.com

Documentation: https://www.fsynth.com/documentation

Forum : https://quiet.fsynth.com

Renoise : https://www.renoise.com/"