multi-touch the storm – interactive sound visuals – subcycle labs from christian bannister on Vimeo.

What if you could mash, mangle, mush, and morph sounds with your fingers on a screen, watching the waveforms dance in response in three dimensions? That “what if” is expressed beautifully in a project by musician-developer Christian Bannister of Portland, Oregon, who works as Subcycle Labs.

The result is like being able to touch sound directly.

Three-dimensional forms morph and vibrate using visuals programmed in Processing, making architectural-organic shapes and spaces that really begin to “look” like sound. These forms can represent synthesis and effects parameters (Christian has done some work with the Massive synth from Native Instruments), or can allow navigation through loops using touch. Gestures remap offsets and duration for audio, scrub and slice, and apply granular resynthesis.

Hello, harp feedback!

I love my job. I get to watch as Peter Dines, contributor on our Kore/Komplete site for NI, constantly cooks up brilliant ideas for sound design. His latest screencast plumbs the depths of Native Instruments’ Massive synth, which he uses in conjunction with Kore. We’ve already seen Peter make song arrangements out of morphing sequenced patches. Now, he focuses on preset design – and gives away some free presets for you to enjoy.

Feedback, Routing and Modulation in Massive from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Feedback, Routing and Modulation in Massive, with Free Patch Downloads [Kore@CDM]

Part of why playing with routing and modulation is such fun in Massive is that it has this semi-modular, drag-and-drop architecture. That’s something I’m gratified to say has been improving in soft synths in general; rather than simply emulating the interface of hardware synths, we’ve really seen some interesting ideas in how to design interfaces as software. I’d also include in this category instruments like Future Audio Workshop’s Circle, which I hope to look at a little more this month. Circle, in fact, was compared to Massive, but while they both have drag-and-drop, color-coded routings, the actual implementation is very different, they’re philosophically different, and sonically different.

Have a look, and let us know if you have your own thoughts on Massive, tips, questions, or anything else.

To really work with music software as an instrument, you have to focus on a set of tools and get deep into what they can do. Today, we’re launching the first of a limited series of minisites that lets us do that. It’s called Kore @CDM, devoted to NI’s Kore and Komplete lines. We’ve built a special blog which will feature regular tips on how to work with this set of tools, basic and advanced tutorials, and downloadable content, all free and open. (The contents of the site will be Creative Commons-licensed, so you’re free to share and modify what we do, with credit to the authors.)

Kore Minisite @CDM, http://kore.noisepages.com

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Why choose this product now?  I’ve felt really strongly, even having been critical of Kore’s first release, that Kore 2 has the potential to live up to its promise of creating a "meta-instrument" for working with sound and effects. Combined with the rest of the Komplete family, including Reaktor’s open-ended patching environment and the scriptable sampler Kontakt, NI has some deep tools — not perfect, not for everyone, but tools that matter to us. We want to really get into how to use them, and to develop a set of techniques and tools for others, both for sound design and live performance, in combination with hosts like Ableton Live. And this means not just doing stuff "by the book," but really seeing how far we can push these tools, sonically and in playability.

Kicking things off is Eoin Rossney, who talks about how to create feedback loops intentionally in Kore for special effects. It’s something mentioned in the manual, but there haven’t been instructions on how to accomplish it until now. Eoin takes that challenge on, and produces some really oddball sounds just by routing effects into themselves. Have a listen to the samples — just be sure to turn your speakers’ volume down first.

How to Route Feedback Loops in Kore – On Purpose [Kore @CDM]

Peter Dines, a Reaktor whiz and author of the Reaktor Tips blog, will also be writing and screencasting for us soon. Both Eoin and Peter have been CDM regulars, so it’s great to have them onboard.

Why we’re partnering with NI: So that we can provide as much content as we can for free, we’ve gotten sponsorship from Native Instruments to produce the site. But that doesn’t mean we want to make an "advertorial." NI has been generous enough to give us full control over the contents, and the goal isn’t a review, or an ad — it’s as much actual knowledge of these tools as we can provide. And, hey, it’s basically our job to demonstrate that by doing as good a job as we can and listening to your feedback. I’m happy to answer questions about why we’re doing things this way and what it means; we can talk in comments or contact the site.

Most of all, though, I hope you’ll check out the site. If you don’t own Kore or the other tools, we’ll still have sound and video samples and will include instructions for trying out projects in the demo, if you just want to kick the tires a bit. And definitely let us know what you think as we roll out more stories, because we want this to be as useful to you as possible.

Oh, yeah, and if you’re wondering about what the "noisepages.com" thing is about, you’ll be hearing more soon. Suffice to say the Kore site isn’t all we’re working on.

Bonus points to anyone else who had the "opportunity" to see the movie Deep Kore Core.