Uploaded April 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Building a "wab-sabi" oscillator in Pd to celebrate the beauty of imperfection and impermanence.
Sine waves are great! The perfection of a pure, single frequency can be both expressively and technically very useful in pursuing our musical goals. There are, however, lots of musical reasons that we might want to intentionally make our oscillators a little more rough around the edges.
Performance on traditional, acoustic instruments, of course, produces a huge amount of micro-variation across each note, and so it can be expressively engaging for us to be able to introduce that same imperfection (analog warmth?) in our digital instruments as well.
In this video, I build a bad sine wave by frequency-modulating my oscillator with noise, and then feeding back the output back into the modulation. While I build this out in Pure Data, the same can be done in Reaktor, Kyma, Max/MSP or any other synthesis environment.
More Pd Tutorials here: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7w4cOVVxL6FB_mmJ77C6fdV8G6L4zDut
No-talking Pure Data jams and patch-from-scratch: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7w4cOVVxL6ESr9SuBYJARJkETfp12Dp3
0:00 Introduction, The Beauty of Imperfection
1:26 Slider-Controlled Sine Wave
3:28 Adding Noise
4:35 Frequency Modulating with Noise
7:24 Filtering the Noise
8:20 Feeding Back into FM
9:55 I've gone too far
13:26 Reaktor Examples
14:18 Closing Thoughts, Next Steps
Official Website - simonhutchinson.com
Subscribe: youtube.com/user/SimonHutc/?sub_confirmation=1
bandcamp: simonhutchinson.bandcamp.com
Buy me a coffee: ko-fi.com/simonhutchinson
Sign up for my mailing list: eepurl.com/hVs7bT
#PureData #SoundSynthesis #SoundDesign #ExperimentalMusic #sinewave #oscillator
Building a "wab-sabi" oscillator in Pd to celebrate the beauty of imperfection and impermanence.
Sine waves are great! The perfection of a pure, single frequency can be both expressively and technically very useful in pursuing our musical goals. There are, however, lots of musical reasons that we might want to intentionally make our oscillators a little more rough around the edges.
Performance on traditional, acoustic instruments, of course, produces a huge amount of micro-variation across each note, and so it can be expressively engaging for us to be able to introduce that same imperfection (analog warmth?) in our digital instruments as well.
In this video, I build a bad sine wave by frequency-modulating my oscillator with noise, and then feeding back the output back into the modulation. While I build this out in Pure Data, the same can be done in Reaktor, Kyma, Max/MSP or any other synthesis environment.
More Pd Tutorials here: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7w4cOVVxL6FB_mmJ77C6fdV8G6L4zDut
No-talking Pure Data jams and patch-from-scratch: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7w4cOVVxL6ESr9SuBYJARJkETfp12Dp3
0:00 Introduction, The Beauty of Imperfection
1:26 Slider-Controlled Sine Wave
3:28 Adding Noise
4:35 Frequency Modulating with Noise
7:24 Filtering the Noise
8:20 Feeding Back into FM
9:55 I've gone too far
13:26 Reaktor Examples
14:18 Closing Thoughts, Next Steps
Official Website - simonhutchinson.com
Subscribe: youtube.com/user/SimonHutc/?sub_confirmation=1
bandcamp: simonhutchinson.bandcamp.com
Buy me a coffee: ko-fi.com/simonhutchinson
Sign up for my mailing list: eepurl.com/hVs7bT
#PureData #SoundSynthesis #SoundDesign #ExperimentalMusic #sinewave #oscillator
