The Spectral Method in Clouds' Spectral Madness

Published on Sep 21, 2015 wellurban

"A detailed exploration of the barely-documented 'Spectral Madness' bonus mode on Clouds. I've read through the source code on github (https://github.com/pichenettes/eurora...), and while I'm not a C programmer, I gleaned enough information to get a more structured sense of what this surprisingly powerful mode can do: it's far more than the afterthought that Mutable Instruments suggest. It's a quirky phase vocoder, capable of subtle and useful treatments as well as spectral weirdness.

The two samples come from the suggested audio set for Music Thing Modular's Radio Music module: the drum loop is played directly from there, while the voice was resampled and lopped in Tyme Sefari II. The bassline is a Dixie II through a Pittsburgh Filter. There is no external processing, and the rest of Clouds' internal effects (stereo spread, feedback and reverb) were also turned off to focus on the spectral processing."