The Insaniac

 A sonic particle cloud computation engine and kinematically-informed synthesis sandbox


Vision

A fun, inspiring, informative and (maybe) useful toy/instrument/artwork. The Insanic provides facilities for experimenting with various forms of granular synthesis, as well as a variety of visualizations and interactive physics-based cnotrols. The vision is to create an environment in which esoteric synthesis techniques are combined in order to study the kinds of sounds that emerge from their intersection.

Motivation

Granular Synthesis
Historically, software for particle-based synthesis has been either too simplistic to afford a wide coverage of the various techniques (such as those proposed by Curtis Roads), or overly generalized in programming tools that are difficult to use for average users. Musical instruments should be beautiful and inspiring, software applications should be intuitive to use, and experimental 'laboratories' should be highly flexible. The Insaniac will attempt to capture all three of these properties to create a user-experince that is fascinating and delightful. See the following table for a subjective overview of the existing granular synthesis tools.

Beautiful    Intuitive    Flexible    
Max/MSP x
CSound x
Supercollider x
ChucK x
Reaktor x x
Alchemy x x
Curtis x x
Cloud Generator x
Pulsar Generator x x
CrusherX x x


Kinematics
As little understood as granular synthesis is, kinematics is hardly used at all in sound synthesis except by synthesists who are also programmers (think specialized max/pd/processing patches or gaming engines). There is an irony to this, since so much of our understanding of real sounds comes from the way objects interact with their enviornment. Computers are capable of simulating these interactions, so it seems appropriate to utilize kinematics for both realistic and abstract sound synthesis.

Kinematics ∩ Granular
Can you imagine the sonification of a rain cloud floating in the sky? What happens when the water molecules condense to raindrops? What is the sound of a raindrop falling? What does it sound like when a single raindrop hits the ground? What if the droplet transforms into another form? What if the sky turns to Jell-O as the cloud passes through it? These are questions that can be mused upon using The Insaniac.

Features - (what it is)

The user experience is simple: the granular synthesis engine plays sounds, which are visualized on the screen and input to a physical system. The physical system then alters the position of the grains in space according to a selected 'scene'. As the particles move and interact, control data is sent back to the synthesis engine for sonification.

The core feature set of The Insaniac is as follows: Milestones