:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Sunday, November 02, 2008 ::

Designing Sound

"A unique, informative, very readable and practical book, "Designing Sound" presents advanced sound design methods for tomorrows video games, interactive applications and computer animations."

Andy Farnell, who Hardoff introduced me to a couple of years ago, has finished and published his book of sound design using PureData. It's been a long time coming. The world seems to be full of books on computer generated imagery but audio synthesis books are much more thin on the ground. This fills a gap nicely.

Andy is selling the initial limited run direct from this website and is hoping a larger publisher will pick it up soon. There is also a great 100odd page abridged PDF Pure Data introduction available for download. Check it out and help support him if your interested.

Labels: Audio, Computing, Electronic Music, FOSS, Pd, Software, Sound

:: Dan 2.11.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
...

I don't game so am not good at keeping up with gaming news, so please forgive this months old link. It's interesting to see that EA are using Pd to create "uniquely flavored" dynamic music for Spore.
[via breakwhore]

Labels: Electronic Music, Gaming, Pd

:: Dan 22.4.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
...

The Puredata workshop I mentioned in April has been postponed due to a lack of bodies. By that I mean it needs people to attend, not this type: "Magician brand instant noodles poisons you because they use oil extracted from human corpses provided by funeral homes." Allegedly.

Anyway. It was due to be this weekend but has been postponed due to low attendance. Had 3 signed up, including myself, needs 8 to run.

Quote:

The Pure Data workshop has been booked for Saturday 9th and Sunday

10th June, 10am-4pm.
It will be over at the St Werburghs Community Centre
The workshop leader is Andy Farnell
Andy has some tutorials here<
And here is the Pd site
and the download section
Cost will be £80, concessions will be £40.
Let me know how definite you are. Also, spread the word :)
cheers, Jake
--
Jake Rayson
[*] firebox.nu FOSS training
[e] jake[at]firebox[dot]nu

A new date hasn't been fixed yet but I really want to go to this. Please get in touch with Jake if you are interested.

Labels: Pd

:: Dan 7.6.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
...

Thanks to hard.off for putting me in contact with Andy Farnell, who he knows via the Pd list.

On his recommendation I popped along to a lunchtime talk by Jake Rayson on Free Free Software at The Cube last week. I was hoping to find out something about getting started with Pd (as I still haven't really got anywhere despite blogging about my intention to for a couple of years now). Although the talk was primarily about getting people who don't use any Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) to consider it I did find some very interesting stuff.

First off, heres some of Jake's recommended FOSS projects. They are all GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac compatible.

Apart form obvious stuff like The Open CD Project, Open Office, Firefox, GIMP (and a skinned version for PhotoShop users, which is of course named GIMPShop) there were also some more complex graphics packages I wasn't aware of. These were Illustrator clones Scribus and Inkscape.
Stunning animation from Blender (The Elephants Dream)
Basic web authoring with N-Vu
VLC Media Player
And audio editor & recorder Audacity

Audacity was demonstrated by playing an MP3 file that he had recently got his hands on from a DJ friend, of Mark E. Smith's new project with Mouse on Mars, The Flenderm Will Get It. It sounds great. Nice to see The Fall working with electronics again, as the material they recorded with Coldcut years ago was excellent (even though I'm not a big Coldcut fan) and this is in much the same vein.

I also found out from Ben at Bristol Wireless that an Open Source version of Buzz Tracker is in development.It goes by the fantastic name of Buzztard.

Most importantly, I found out that Andy and Jake are running a PureData beginners workshop in June, details as follows:

The Pure Data workshop has been booked for Saturday 9th and Sunday
10th June, 10am-4pm.
It will be over at the St Werburghs Community Centre
The workshop leader is Andy Farnell
Andy has some tutorials here
And here is the Pd site
and the download section
Cost will be £80, concessions will be £40.
Let me know how definite you are. Also, spread the word :)
cheers, Jake
--
Jake Rayson
[*] firebox.nu FOSS training
[e] jake[at]firebox[dot]nu

Labels: FOSS, Pd

:: Dan 22.4.07 [Arc] [1 comments] [links to this post] ::
...