I’m now on the steps to creating a composition for the Metal Petals ‘instrument’. The composition itself will be an MSP patch sequencing and playing back processed samples. Although controlling a ready-made soft-synth and sequencer (like Reason and Digital Performer) would make the composition simpler to do, it would lack the sort of control and abstract sonic texture that I feel is necessary to make this piece compelling.

Granular Synthesis is an audio processing technique that uses individual “grains” of audio to construct a meaningful sound or texture. This has obvious relevance to Metal Petals, which is in essence a performance based on solving a puzzle constructed of musical pieces (e.g. grains).

After trying to write my own granular synthesis algorithms from scratch, I was giving Luis Alvarez, and the sewing machine I gave him, a ride to Manhattan when he told me he had been studying granular synthesis in the “Frameworks” class. As they started playing with “the granular synthesis patch made by someone in Japan, he had thought of its relevance to the Metal Petals and my ideas of reconstruction of music.

This was a lucky coincidence since my own granular synthesis patches were outputting extremely choppy sounds at best and none of the ITP gurus, some of whom helped create Max/MSP/Jitter, would even feign to respond to my request for advice. (There seems to be a surprising amount of vanity in the nether-regions where music and video intermingle).

The mother of all granular synthesis patches that Luis sent me is made by Nobuyasu Sakodna and is quite difficult to find online despite its popularity among those in the know. His website is http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/~nsakonda/ and the patch is aptly titled “MSP Granular Synthesis patch”.

My intention is to become familiar with the sounds I can get out of this patch, change it around a bit so that it suits my needs more exactly, and then hook it up to the video tracking patch and come up with an idea of how the movement in the video image will evolve the music and reassemble the grains over time. All the while, the design has to be built to accommodate an unavoidably high level of error in the tracking algorithm.