Today I’ve progressed my Creative Sound Work that I’m making with Python and the DSP library called ‘PYO’. After having created a chord progression that will act as a base for my track and having experimented with some effects, I wanted to create a bass line, let’s see the code for this specific section and I will explain it a bit.
The bass line it’s quite simple, the object ‘Choice’ is going to choose a note from a list, where I’ve added the frequencies of 3 notes, one of them repeated and a zero value which is going to leave some room in between notes. This random choice is going to alternate the order of the notes every time which will give a generative feel to the composition. I also created a function called repeat like I did in the chord progression, in order to repeat the envelope, the object ‘Pattern’ then calls the function on loop. This is the best method that I’ve found to create sequences, and there might be other ways to create patterns but in this case this worked for me. At the end of the day this is the first composition that I make entirely with coding and I happy with the progress that I’ve done.
After having created a structure with a pad and a bass line I wanted to create something more textural that I called ‘Bubbles’. In this sound I added plenty of random generators on tempo and delay times and feedback, as well as a much longer list of frequencies for the object ‘Choice’ to select. I think that I really recreated a sparkling texture that you be able to listen in the final composition.
The main waveform here is a sine wave again and the envelope attack and sustain is very short, this bring a very clicky feel to the sound, and the different pitches and delay times creates the drops falling kind of idea.
I will also like to show here some GUI components that we will be able to use every time we run the code on Python, these windows feature sliders with the different parameter that we find in the code, allowing us to fine-tune and copy them later to the code sheet to achieve the desired sound. These windows are shown when we add the method ‘.ctrl’ right after our variable. For example:
# Our variable and desired object
Synth1 = LFO(freq=220, mul=0.5).out()
# On the next line of code
Synth.ctrl(title="Synth LFO")
# The parameter 'title' allow us to name the window.
# Now we will be able to modificative parameters in a visual way.My sound work is starting to take shape and it will be soon finished, I’m quite happy with the result so far, taking into account that is the first track I make using only code, and I think that this track is much more about the process than the composition itself, being in this process stages like, researching, learning basic code in Python or installing all the needed libraries, which have been very important too.