Patch: self-conscious FM

Hello!

As a proof of concept I’ve been trying to make a 2-oscillator-feedbacking-FM-synth to control itself… I share it as is, very under-documented and messy enough to make @rodrigo.constanzo sneer :wink:

With my love of dirty sounds with sort of fire-y behaviour, I set a few presets in there for fun. I’m sure there is a way to get something more smooth out of it, but I like the instable cybernetics agency of it all!

How I proceeded was simple: I coded the synth part at the top, and modulated some parameters by hand, aiming for messy behaviours. I monitored the 7 descriptors, and started to think of some sort of mapping, and found that I was more excited about the amount of change (running difference, or first derivative approximation) to go crazy when boring and the other way round… anyways, I then put controls on these mappings, in line of Alberto de Campo 2nd order virtuosity (“relinquish control to gain influence”).

I hope you enjoy. Maybe @jamesbradbury will be reminded of his tunes, but without much of the cleverness that made them good :wink:


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1 Like

Damn! This is cool!!! Even with a simple mapping of descriptor -> FM the length of average operates as an effective parameter for control. Monday is much better now…

1 Like

This sounds like a chaotic oscillator. Logistic map aesthetics or dedication to Russell Haswell ? ahaha

2 Likes

For me it has more control than my chaotic oscillators though… hence the reference to @jamesbradbury’s piece

I also thought it had a wider range of predictable outputs - but then @pasquetje you are the chaos specialist so you would know how each implementation sounds. Did you try to control the different ranges of your oscillator with a similar cheap cybernetic patch?

I think there is something super interesting to do there… A few feedback loops to inject somewhere. I should have a closer look. :slight_smile:

1 Like