Description

BankOSCmr is a Sound Generator, not a synth, and the MIDI input is just about as limited as it is possible to be. It provides 32 sine-wave oscillators simultaneously...

The display shows the 32 oscillators from left to right, and each vertical shows the frequency as an orange square and associated bar underneath, and shows the amplitude (the volume...) as a purple square and associated bar underneath. Low frequencies and amplitudes are at the bottom, and high frequencies and amplitudes are at the top.

You can't edit the 32 oscillators directly from the display - the display is purely for display!

To control the oscillators, the controls on the left affect:

- the Rate at which the update sweeps across the oscillators from left to right

- the High and Low extremes of the frequencies of the oscillators

- the Time for the frequencies and amplitudes to change to the new values as it sweeps across...

- a 'New' button (at the top of the Van De Graaf) to generate a new set of random values for frequency and amplitude (If you send a MIDI note to this device when the Rate is set to the slowest time (...all the way clock-wise: 'Run' changes to 'Stop'), then this triggers the 'New' button.)

For version 0.03f, then the main new additions are the Freq and Volume 'damping' controls, and these affect the way that the density of the oscillator frequencies and volumes are affected by the scanning across the oscillators. Low values of damping create thick clusters of frequencies, whilst high values of damping give more open, thin wisps of frequencies. I also added a timed 'Update' function, which resets the frequencies and volumes of the oscillators to random values, just to add a bit of variety in how the oscillators can be controlled. 'Fill' is a ramp value generator: less than 0.10 = Random, despite what the graphic says!

(The simple state-variable filter that provided low-pass, high-pass, band-pass and notch transfer functions, and had Frequency and Q controls... has gone. Sorry.)

Oh, and finally an Output control with lots of range...

BankOSCmr can produce a range of not-so-ordinary sounds, and this is the second draft of one of my irregular explorations into sound generation. I'm much happier with the range of sounds that this version can produce!

Youtube live demo video (updated) of 0v03 is at: https://youtu.be/MP1e5vl5gp8

Youtube demo video of 0v01 is at: https://youtu.be/mTSEXFMNixE

SoundCloud demo of 0v01 is at:

https://soundcloud.com/martinruss/bankosc0v01demosounds

First Blog (more details of UI): http://synthesizerwriter.blogspot.com/2018/07/my-first-visit-to-bank-of-oscillators.html

After a report of Live crashing with version 0v01, I did some extended debugging and found a strange jsonwriter message sometimes appearing in the Max Console. I discussed this with Ableton and Cycling'74, and we were unable to consistently reproduce a crash, so I have implemented their suggestions to give the second release (0v02). The functionality was the same (so I didn't updated the screenshot!), but some of the object settings were tidied up and additional protection added.

New functionality has now been added in 0v03...