By gtaylor, Section Journals, Topic gworld
Posted on Tue Sep 14, 2004 at 10:25:01 PM EST
While I'm generally interested in generative systems, I've been toying with and thinking about flocking algorithms for the past year or so--first, because they're elegant and beautiful, a secondly because I like the kind of not-random-but-not-predictable quality that they add when applied to parameter spaces. So it seemed reasonable to try out some flocking analog synthesis.
You'll find some different versions of the flock in action on the upcoming third volume of the Cycles series of audio libraries from Cycling '74 (titled Incidental Gesture), to which I contributed.
I've kept the example pitifully simple; there's no reason you couldn't add interesting bells and whistles (filtering a tuned oscillator bank instead of white noise, replacing the formant filter bank with other filter modules in the MMV and then changing the parameter numbers to drive the filters, and so on), or create control structures in the Max patch that would modify the flocking algorithm over time to create even more complex outputs. In my case, I fired up the patch on one machine and let it run through the monitor speakers while I worked on docs on the other machine. I find white noise so centering, don't you?
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