Thank ya 🥹🥹🥹

Learning some ways to make digital filters self oscillate (since analogue filters have an inherit noise floor), and learned that I can add a -120 dB noise to the circuit and will (more or less) behave the same way!

The idea is coming from some experimentation over the last few days trying to handle some no input mixer technique. The serial “bandpass” filter in the feedback loop generates — and also modifies the output.

Making music with prototypes early in the process. A “soft skill” was developed by realizing musical gestures — and much of the design choices were massaged into place in that process. Equal time on Xcode and Ableton was probably the right balance.

Writing a “protect your ears” function that detect signals greater than 20 dB and automatically shut down the DSP. God I wish I did this earlier.

Max/MSP. My colleague Matthew Davidson (former Cycling 74) told me that “Max allows you to find out which ideas are stupid much quicker”. Though I picked up C++ to ‘get away’ from Max, it still played a vital role in the process of finding the stupid ideas quicker.

A plug-ins purpose can be a functional one (which EQ’s and Limiters are), but it can just as much be an artistic one. Articulating a range of sounds was more of an artistic challenge — listening of records, studying technique, and deriving a “shared resource” that exists in a music scene.

UI turned out to be world building. Once the functional need to set parameter values are met, it was more about designing an environment that invites imagination. Peaks was more or less inspired by the mountaintops of southern Oregon that I passed through a train this summer.