Category: Education

The Soundboard App

Here’s a little how-to for a project I started doing this year with my advanced classes. It’s a bit more complex than just the patch, but the soundboard is the most interesting part of the project.

Soundboard apps are one of the more common gimmick apps on the iPhone, so many students already understand what it’s supposed to do: You hit a button, it plays a sound. Simple, right?


Figure one: the thing that makes the noise

THE THING THAT MAKES THE NOISE
In PD, “tilde” objects are the ones that deal with sound. In our soundboard patch, the only two objects that directly deal with sound are tabplay~ (reads the sound buffer as audio) and dac~ (the final output to speakers). The button you see above tabplay~ is called a “bang” and it does what you think it does.


Figure two: the array, where sounds live

WHERE THE SOUND LIVES
In PD, sound lives in buffers called “arrays”. You have to both make the array, and tell PD to read the audio file into it. To get the sound into the array so that each time you load the patch it will be there is kind of dodgy – you have to hard code it. Meaning, you will ask PD to look in a specific location for the sound. I’ve noticed that some versions of PD hate filenames and folders with spaces in them, so try to avoid those if possible. Also, sound must be in an uncompressed format like wav or aif.


The sound loading routine – the “read” message is the only part of this patch that feels like actual programming.

You must get the read message box right or else your sound will not load. It goes like this: read is the command. “-resize” tells the array to be the same length as the sound file. Then, the file path. Finally the name of the array it’s going to land in. Make sense? Good.

Soundfiler takes the read message in as a command and makes it happen. You don’t need to connect it to anything.

Assuming you got this to work, you may have gotten your soundboard to work!

NEXT STEPS
Making the soundboard useful is another task. In lieu of having a video game that’s interactive hook into the patch (a holy grail goal of mine for this project) I opted for an alternative. Live but digital foley.

Here’s how it works. I use a 2-3 minute video clip from a video game. The students make sound that are needed for that clip (jump, door opening, lasers, etc.) They make a PD soundboard that uses those sounds.

Then we use JACK to route the PD audio back into GarageBand where it can be recorded. I play the clip on my projector so the whole class can see it at once and they “perform” their clips from the patch into GB. Then, they take a low res version of the video and re-sync it so they can export it as a project. Possible extensions might be writing some BGM for it as well, but that might make the project take a bit too long.

Wormhole

The problem: DAW files are notoriously not portable, and audio scrub bars are terribly boring to watch during playback. I want to get my students’ projects up on the big screen and speakers so I can hear and see the projects as they do at their station, with very few “oh well that didn’t work today” moments.

This is totally possible in software. This nifty trick is usually handled by a pricey piece of hardware (I’m looking at you…and you…and you). That’s not how I roll though – I like to do things MacGuyver style.

First you need some twine, a match, and silly putty a regular DAW that can host plugins. If you’re reading this blog you probably have that. (hint: GarageBand will work just fine). Now, go here yesterday and get Wormhole. It’s free. Go here and get Chicken of the VNC too (I’m assuming you’re on a Mac. If you don’t…wait I just checked my site logs – about 80% chance you do.)

OK, so the end goal is going to be grabbing any student computer’s audio and video and throwing it up on the projector and the big room speakers.

Before reading how I use it, you might want to read the Wormhole manual. Download the plugin, follow the install instructions and you can continue. (Protip: you can install audio plugins on a non-privileged machine. Just do it in the ~/user/library/audio/plugins/components folder. DAW’s look in there as well as in the root library folder. *Ahem*

SETTING IT UP
In GarageBand (or your DAW of choice) have a file set up that uses Wormhole as an insert, has a small blank audio clip, and loops a very short section continuously. The audio clip is there for a bug that Plasq never patched, and the loop is to make sure you don’t miss any of the student’s audio once they hit play.

On the student’s machine, have them add Wormhole to a master track. Have them type their name in the box and hit enter. That’s it on their end.

At the teacher desk, open your premade project, open the Wormhole plugin, and select the student you want to hear. Hit play on your machine. Ask the student to hit play on theirs (or just do it through VNC for them). Voila – student audio coming through the teacher’s computer and sending out to the big speakers!

Chicken of the VNC is another no-brainer. This lets you see and control each students’ desktop. Not only is it useful for fixing a problem without walking across the room, it’s worth seeing the look on their face the first time you take over their computer. Love it.

Between VNC and Wormhole, we have a solution to virtualize all the output from a student station so everyone can see everyone’s projects on sharing day (you do sharing day right?) on the big screen with the big speakers.

Now doesn’t that make you feel all 21st century?

Droppin some sick nasties

Phrase of the moment for Music Tech level 2. Allow me to explain.

We start level 2 with a pretty straightforward message of “LEARN ABLETON LIVE NOW OR ELSE”. Honestly, there are usually a few students who are put off by the program; nothing is labeled, the colors are plain and drab, and it honestly looks like some kind of alien interface you’d see in Star Trek.

This all changes, however, as we learn that Ableton Live can unlock some of those “how did they do that?” questions about pop music.

DIRTY BEATS
First off, the drum kits in Ableton are nice. Especially the electronic ones – way out, trippy crazy sounding kits that someone like Andre 3000 or Will.I.Am would be proud to call his own.

Then we get to learning the clip slots. And record quantization. And MIDI effects like arpeggiator and chord. And beat repeat (my favorite).

Then it all starts to come together and the last vestiges of the “but I liked GarageBand better!” crowd begin to disappear and Ableton reigns supreme (at least until we get computers that can run Logic 9).

To sum it up, students are amazed at how much better their drum programming can be in Live versus how it was back in Level 1 with GarageBand. It’s like that scene in the Matrix where he learns how to fly a helicopter just by plugging something into his head. This type of “holy cow that was easy” moment is what I try to exploit in both classes this early in the year.

To commemorate this year, I’ve decided to play off of the fact that Level 2 is a more pro-focused class, with projects decidedly in the “real world” column most of the time. Every project is going to have a real producer that we study to go along with it. We’ll listen to their music, try to use their style as inspiration, and try to deconstruct the tricks of their trade.

This week the producer we’re looking at is Timbaland. I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

Global Media

This year I’m in charge of the TV studio at LHS. Here’s a rundown of the changes I’m making to the production process.

THE PAST
First, I love the guy who used to run the studio, so this isn’t criticism – I want to give background on how the studio used to operate. I’ve made changes based on my personal preferences and needs, not out of spite for the old methods (which worked pretty well for him).

From the camera and mikes, they ran into a Mackie mixer and a Streamgenie computer. The Streamgenie served as the video mixer as well. Signals were mixed from live camera feed with a DVD player which held all transitions. Music was cued live. Everything was cued live. A student sat at the Streamgenie to cue titles and overlays, and the whole thing dumped to a DVD recorder’s HDD. The HDD would loop the final product all day until the next filming and blasted out to the closed-circuit system in the school.

THE PRESENT
I prefer having a little more room for error. I remember having a discussion with Jorge, the man in charge before; he said they do it all live to avoid having to do post-production. For my style, I felt that a little post would be better than having to get it perfect live, so here we go – this is what I’m thinking will work for me:

From camera and mikes to digital mixer and Panasonic DV bridge (that is made for this camera). FireWire to a MacBook running Quicktime for A/V capture. Camera operator and director leave room in the shots for stuff like titles and overlays, and silent time for editing in transitions. Total time after we get good should be about 20 minutes before post work.

Post work includes throwing the clips of each news segment into an iMovie project, then overlaying the titles and pictures for each story. Transitions will live in the media library after we make them in LiveType to be easily thrown into the timeline as needed. Music the same – added during post.

Movie gets exported, played back in QT and looped until next filming.

Post process should take about 20-30 minutes (just enough time to fit into a class)

WHERE WE ARE
We’re about 2 weeks until we go live. Here’s what we’re doing: Every day we are going to produce an announcements that will get thrown away and never seen. Today we burned a bulb out and had a delay, but the ideas is this week it will take 1.5-2 days to get a segment done, and next week it will be close to the ideal time. If we get our rhythm right, we can come out with higher-quality clips with fewer errors in the same amount of time. Let’s hope my idea works.

Also, it turns out most students have no idea we even have a studio. They must have thought the announcements were just done in a regular classroom.

To raise awareness, I drafted up a logo for the (now) combined Music/TV studio at our school. It’s going to go on a sign outside the studio as well as on T-Shirts,paraphernalia, etc.

(the school is on Drake road get it?)

Oh yeah, I also added a mobile reporting team…more on that development later.

First week back

Just some details about how I start out a new batch of students each semester.

LEVEL I: GARAGEBAND PLAYGROUND
The first week for brand new level I’ers is all about play. Why? Because most of these students, musicians or not, have no idea what to do with a piece of music software. Here’s how I got their toes in the water this time around.

Day 1: The demo
I show how GarageBand lets you write a song in 5 minutes or less. This is important to stress. “Real” musicians know that I’m talking about the loop library, and that doesn’t exactly count as writing a song but to most students this doesn’t matter. The sheer fact that they are clicking a button and hearing something brand new to them is novel, and an important hook to the class.

I show them how to drag loops into the arrangement, how to play/pause, and maybe how to plink on the keyboard.

Day 2: More buttons
Now we still work with loops, but I’m focusing little 7-10 minute segments on different controls. Solo/Mute for instance; I show them how it works, and then for 7-10 minutes they experiment with the behavior of these track controls. I do the same for volume/pan automation. Hear that engineers? I have them start automation on Day 2!

I also show them how to record their voice on the microphone and add effects. This is another hook. Remember, students can drop classes in the first week/week and a half so hooks are very important. P.S. they love “Helium Voice”.

Day 3: Conversation
I extend the voice recording to two tracks, and we do a mini project. I pan each track opposite L/R all the way. Then, I record myself having a conversation…with myself. One person is on track 1, the other is on track 2. Then, I tell them to apply effects so it sounds like two different people talking. Darth Vader talking to a mouse, for instance. Totally fun, totally non-threatening is the key. Haven’t talked about any music terms beyond volume and pan yet.

Day 3 was Friday for us, so I’ll keep you posted. This week is going to be about song forms, so we use those loops to make something reminiscent of the backgrounds to a pop song.