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Audio effects

Basic effects

Pitch

Octer

Made by Ben Gold. Sonic Pi’s octaver.

  • octer: octave harmonics
  • octersub: half-frequency harmonics
  • octersubsub: quarter-frequency harmonics

Frequency Shifter

Made by Ben Gold. Simple frequency shifter. Description taken from the SuperCollider FreqShift object documentation:

FreqShift implements single sideband amplitude modulation, also known as frequency shifting, but not to be confused with pitch shifting. Frequency shifting moves all the components of a signal by a fixed amount but does not preserve the original harmonic relationships.)

  • fshift: shift
  • fshiftnote:
  • fshiftphase: phase of the shifted frequency

Ring modulation

Made by Ben Gold. Ring modulation:

  • ring: modulation amount
  • ringf: modulation frequency
  • ringdf: slide in modulation frequency

Tremolo

  • tremolodepth / tremdp: tremolo depth
  • tremolorate / tremr: tremolo speed

Time and Space

Delay

Tidal default delay effect:

  • delay: wet/dry
  • delaytime / delayt: delay time
  • delayfeedback / delayfb: feedback amount
  • lock: a pattern of numbers. Specifies whether delaytime is calculated relative to cps. When set to 1, delaytime is a direct multiple of a cycle.

Reverb

Tidal default reverb effect, by Jost Muxfeld and James McCartney. Values from 0 to 1:

  • dry: dry amount
  • room: room size
  • size / sz: metaphor for depth

Leslie

Emulation of a Leslie speaker: speakers rotating in a wooden amplified cabinet:

  • leslie: dry and wet amount
  • lrate: modulation rate (6.7 for fast, 0.7 for slow)
  • lsize: physical size of the cabinet in meters. Be careful, it might be slightly larger than your computer. Affects the Doppler amount (pitch warble)

Phaser

  • phaserrate / phasr: speed
  • phaserdepth / phasdp: depth

Spectral delay

Spectral delay coded by Mads Kjeldgaard:

  • xsdelay: ???
  • tsdelay: ???

Magnitude Freeze

Made by Mads Kjeldgaard. Freeze magnitudes at current levels when freze > 0 and advances phase according to difference between frames to try and maintain current spectral quality:

  • freeze: freeze amount

Envelope

ASR Envelope

  • attack / att: in seconds.
  • hold : in seconds.
  • release / rel: in seconds.

Legato

  • legato: amount of overlap between two adjacent synth sounds. Values less than one (e.g. 0.5) will cut the sound off sooner. Values greater than one (e.g. 1.5) will cut the sound off later

Filters

DJ Filter

Made by Alex McLean. A fun classic DJ Filter. Low pass filter for the first half of the range, high pass for the rest:

  • djf: 0 to 1

Lowpass filter

  • cutoff / lpf: cutoff amount in hertz
  • resonance / lpq: from 0 to 1

Highpass filter

  • hcutoff / hpf: cutoff amount in hertz
  • hresonance / hpq: resonance

Bandpass filter

  • bandf / bpf: center frequency in hertz
  • bandq / bpq: resonance

Vowel

Formant filter to make things sound like vowels. You can use a e i o u. Use a rest ~ or consonant p to override the effect:

  • vowel: choose a vowel or a pattern of vowels
d1 $ s "gtr*5" #vowel "a e i o u"
d1 $ s "gtr*7" #vowel "p p a e i o ~"

Spectral comb filter

Made by Mads Kjeldgaard. Number of teeth and width of the comb are all controlled using one floating point number:

  • comb: number of teeths and width of the comb filter

Spectral high pass filter

Made by Mads Kjeldgaard. * hbrick: floats from 0.0 to 1.0

Spectral low pass filter

Made by Mads Kjeldgaard. * lbrick: floats from 0.0 to 1.0

Distortion

Distort

Made by Ben Gold. A crunchy distortion with a lot of high harmonics.

  • distort: distortion amount

Triode

Made by Ben Gold. Triode-like distortion, uses only one parameter.

  • triode: distortion amount

Shape

A type of amplifier:

  • shape: values from 0 to 1

Squiz

Made by Calum Gunn. Reminiscent of some weird mixture of filter, ring-modulator and pitch-shifter. Try passing multiples of 2 to it - 2, 4, 8 etc. The SuperCollider manual defines Squiz as:

A simplistic pitch-raising algorithm. It’s not meant to sound natural; its sound is reminiscent of some weird mixture of filter, ring-modulator and pitch-shifter, depending on the input. The algorithm works by cutting the signal into fragments (delimited by upwards-going zero-crossings) and squeezing those fragments in the time domain (i.e. simply playing them back faster than they came in), leaving silences inbetween. All the parameters apart from memlen can be modulated.

  • squiz: squiz amount

Phasing

Shaping

Tremolo

Leslie

Spectral

Bits

Bin shifting

Made by Mads Kjeldgaard. Shift and scale the position of the bins. Can be used as a very crude frequency shifter/scaler:

  • binshift: stretching and shifting of bins

Bin scrambling

Made by Mads Kjeldgaard. Accepts floats to control the width and placement of the scrambling in the spectrum:

  • scram: ???

Crush

A classic bitcrushing effect:

  • crush: 1 for a drastic reduction in bit-depth, 16 for barely no reduction

Coarse

Fake audio resampling:

  • coarse: 1 for original, 2 for half, 3 for a third and so on

Waveloss

Made by Calum Gunn. Divides an audio stream into tiny segments, using the signal’s zero-crossings as segment boundaries, and discards a fraction of them. Takes a number between 1 and 100, denoted the percentage of segments to drop. The SuperCollider manual describes the Waveloss effect this way:

Divide an audio stream into tiny segments, using the signal’s zero-crossings as segment boundaries, and discard a fraction of them (i.e. replace them with silence of the same length). The technique was described by Trevor Wishart in a lecture. Parameters: the filter drops drop out of out of chunks. mode can be 1 to drop chunks in a simple deterministic fashion (e.g. always dropping the first 30 out of a set of 40 segments), or 2 to drop chunks randomly but in an appropriate proportion.)

  • mode: ???
  • waveloss: ???

Krush

Made by Ben Gold from Sonic Pi’s krush.

  • krush: dry-wet (0 for dry)
  • kcutoff: cutoff of the krush filter

Other

Magnitude smearing

Made by Mads Kjeldgaard. Accepts floats to determine the amount of smearing:

  • smear: amount of smearing

Spectral conformer

Made by Mads Kjeldgaard. SuperCollider description:

Applies the conformal mapping z → (z - a) / (1 - za*) to the phase vocoder bins z with a given by the real and imag inputs to the UGen. Makes a transformation of the complex plane so the output is full of phase vocoder artifacts but may be musically fun. Usually keep |a| < 1 but you can of course try bigger values to make it really noisy. a = 0 should give back the input mostly unperturbed.

You can also check this link.

  • real: ???
  • imag: ???

Spectral enhance

Made by Mads Kjeldgaard.

  • enhance: ???