Orbiter: collisions driving sampler #3

YouTube via rubymatt — May 03, 2010 — "Now optimised to handle up to 64 particles at 50Hz. With 8 voices collisions can trigger one of two samples."

Audio not so good in the previous two vis:

Orbiter: collisions play sampler #2

"rubymatt — April 27, 2010 — Particles now have an "energy level" that is randomly assigned at initialisation time. Brighter particles have more energy. When particles collide they trigger a slice of the sample to play (the sample is divided into a number slices equal to the number of particles) based on their particle numbers. Pitch is related to Y position, Granularity to X, Speed & amplitude to the collision energy. It's all still captain random and, maybe, will never amount to much but it's been interesting getting this far and nice to hear *something* for my (quite disproportionate) efforts!"

Orbiter: collisions driving sampler

"rubymatt — April 26, 2010 — When two particles collide it now triggers the sampler. The collision parameters (and particle data) determine the resynthesis parameters. Lots of work to do here. Spectular: YouTube have stripped the audio channel from my video again leaving only the mic audio. Useless."


Update:

TMA-2: Energy to velocity

rubymatt — May 04, 2010 — "This thing doesn't get any less silly.

In the latest version particle energy now determines particle speed (brighter particles have more energy and move faster). At this point the only thing left to fix in the basic model is the result of collisions. At the moment only one particle is redirected.

It's not apparent from the video but I also spent quite some time doing further CPU optimisations to make 64 particles feasible. In the previous version I was still getting audio overloads. Even then though I have had to drop the update frequency to 25Hz.

Once the base model is complete the next thing to add is a gravity well that you can place in the vessel to deform the trajectory of particles. Since the X,Y co-ordinates of a collision determine the pitch and granularity of the sample playback this will offer a means to 'shape' the sound without directly controlling it.

A future version of the Reaktor ensemble (tentatively called TMA-2 at this point) will drive an additive oscillator bank instead of a sampler. That might prove more musical. Or not..."