Modulating the modulators

A control function with a particular shape can serve a role similar to a traditional musical motive. Even when it is modified in duration, rhythm, or shape, its relation to the original remains evident and it serves to unify a larger composition. A motive or shape might be recognizable at different structural/temporal levels, in which case the form may take on a "fractal" or "self-similar" character.

In other chapters we've taken some first and intermediate steps to progressively increase the complexity of examples in which a control function modulates another modulator of the same shape, such that a single shaped is used at different formal levels in a somewhat self-similar manner.

Here's a more full blown example of a single control function used to modulate a sound at many formal levels, with modulators modulating other modulators, in this case including the parameters of pitch, note rate, volume, and panning (location).


The carrier sound is a triangle wave oscillator, in the tri~ object. The volume of that oscillator is continually modulated in a way that actually separates it into individual notes; it is windowed by a repeating triangular shape going from 0 to 1 and back to 0--the first half of the triangle function stored in the wavetable in the buffer~. The rate of those notes is itself modulated by a triangle function, varying from 1 to 15 notes per second every 25 seconds (the rate is varied up and down + and - 7 from a central rate of 8 Hz, by a triangle oscillator with a rate of 0.04 Hz).

The volume of the sound is further modulated by another triangular LFO that creates a swell and dip of + and - 15 dB in the overall volume every ten seconds, to give a periodic crescendo and diminuendo spanning 30 decibels, which is about as much as most instrumentalists do in practice, even though their instruments are often technically capable of a wider range of intensities.

The pitch of the sound is modulated in almost exactly the same way as was demonstrated in another article. The pitch glides in a triangular shape around a central pitch that is itself slowly changing in a triangular shape over a span of every 50 seconds. The rate of the glissandi varies from 1 to 15 Hz, varying triangularly in a 20-second cycle. The depth of the glissandi varies from + and - 0 to 12 semitones, controlled by a 15-second cycle (perceptually a 7.5-second cycle).

The perceived location of the sound pans back and forth between left and right controlled by a triangular function at a rate that varies from 1/16 Hz to 16 Hz -- quite gradually to quite quickly -- with the rate itself determined by a triangular cycle that repeats every 30 seconds, using the most common panning technique, known as "intensity panning". This takes advantage of the fact that one of the main indicators of the location of a sound's source is inter-aural intensity difference (IID), the balance of the sound's intensity in our two ears. The more the intensity of sound in one ear exceeds the intensity in the other ear, the more we are inclined to think the sound comes from that direction. Thus, varying the sound's intensity from 0 to 1 for one ear (or one speaker) as we vary the intensity from 1 to 0 in the other ear (or the other speaker) gives the impression of the sound being at different locations between the two ears (speakers). So a triangle wave with an amplitude of + and - 0.5, centered around 0.5 is used to vary the gain of the right audio channel, and 1 minus that value is used to determine the gan of the left audio channel. As one channel fades from 0 to 1, the other channel fades from 1 to 0, and vice versa.

Our sense of the distance of sound sources is complicated, but in general it's roughly proportional to the amplitude of the sound. So the same sound at half the amplitude would -- all other things being the same -- tend to sound half as close to us (that is, twice as distant). The perceived overall intensity of the sound will depend on the sum of the two audio channels. Perceived intensity is proportional to the square of the amplitude, and the perceived overall intensity is thus proportional to the sum of the squares of the amplitudes of the two channels. So if we want to keep the sound seeming to be the same distance from the listener as we pan from left to right, we need to keep the sum of the squares of their amplitudes the same. So, as a final step before output, we take the square root of the desired intensity for each channel, and use that as the gain control value for the channel. The picture below shows the gain values for the two channels as they are initially calculated by the triangle function (on the left) and then shows the actual gain values that will be used -- the square roots (on the right). The first is the desired intensity of the two channels, and the second is the actual amplitude for the two channels that's required to deliver that intensity as the virtual sound location moves between left and right.


In order to make the rate of panning span the desired range from 1/16 Hz to 16 Hz, we used the triangle function as the exponent of the base 2, using the pow~ object. As the triangle function (the exponent) varies from 0 to 4 to -4 to 0, the result will vary from 1 to 16 to 1/16 to 1. When the rate is less than about 1 Hz, the duration of each panning cycle is greater than 1 second, and we can follow the panning as simulated movement; when the rate is greater than 1 Hz, the complete left-right cycle of panning takes places in less than a second, up to as little as 1/16 of a second (62.5 ms), so we perceive it more as a sort of "location tremolo" sound effect.

So in this example program the triangle wave function was used in nine different ways:
1) as the carrier waveform
2) as a window (amplitude envelope) to make individual "note" events
3) to modulate the rate and duration of the notes
4) to create 10-second volume swells
5) to vary the central pitch of the oscillator
6) to make pitch glissandi around that central pitch
7) to vary the depth of those glissandi
8) to vary the rate of those glissandi
9) to vary the panning of the sound