Recreating the THX Deep Note - EarSlap | Hacker News Reader

Recreating the THX Deep Note - EarSlap

batuhanbozkurt.com

52 pointsjawngee13 comments

Turn it up! Turn it up!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3_HHZFi0As

On a more serious note, I'm really a fan of SuperCollider (especially for it's smalltalk-like dynamic language). It's incredibly good for sound design and real-time experimentation.

But for the best quality output, Csound (http://www.csounds.com/) is hard to beat. Here are some people who tried to recreate the same effect in Csound:

http://csound.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/the-thx™-sound-from-c...

http://joesprojectblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/thx-deep-note-ch...

I like this one- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMchJfsIj7E&NR=1

I find the note at the end about SCTwitting the most fascinating. Music represented as code confined to a character limit of a broadcast medium...just wow.

I know a few digital poets who will have a field day with this. Thanks for sharing!

Thomas Dolby apparently made a living for some years composing cellphone ringtones, which I think also have to fit into a small amount of space and be synthesizable in real-time on a limited processor.

They were almost certainly prerecorded. Or he could have composed some MIDI tracks.

But seriously doubt that they were synthesized in real-time.

Playing a MIDI track involves synthesizing waveforms in real time, so I'm not sure what you're saying here. There have been plenty of phones that supported monophonic or mildly polyphonic ringtones without supporting full PCM, and plenty more that supported PCM samples but have limited space, kind of like old .MOD files.

I'm saying that they probably use a general midi sound bank, with sample sounds and limited control. You can only choose instruments from a predefined palette.

I doubt you could generate your own waveforms, apply your own custom effects and so on.

I never researched much into MIDI ringtones so I might be wrong.

This reminds me to ask, is anyone aware of any beginner-friendly books on audio synthesis? Be it using csound, supercollider, or chuck, just something that explains concepts reasonably well.

For SuperCollider there's a book which is not out yet (I have read a draft and found it excellent, especially for beginners) but it should be out soon.

You can try to send an email to one of the authors: http://www.music.utah.edu/faculty/faculty_a-z/david_michael_...

He used to send a pdf of the draft version if you asked him, but since the printed book is due soon (by MIT press) I don't know if this is still true.

There's also 'The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music' by Miller Puckette (the author of Pure Data):

http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/techniques.htm

The examples are, obviously, in Pure Data. But it is an excellent book and all the concepts can be applied to any synthesis language/tool.

For Csound there's 'The Csound Book' by Richard Boulanger (MIT Press):

http://csounds.com/shop/csound-book

This is also excellent. Disclaimer: the author is a friend.

My old roommate was recruited to write one of the chapters (on language internals and his CocoaCollider bridge), but last I heard MIT Press had dropped the project.

IIRC it would have been the first supercollider book.

I've found this

http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Music-Tutorial-Curtis-Roads/d...

book to be an excellent tour of the standard concepts and techniques of computer music (not just synthesis). It is both technical and accessible. Makes an excellent companion to whatever specific tools you choose to use.

Of course, I forgot it. It's a classic.

If I was teaching someone how to program and wanted to get across the idea of incremental development, this is the first example I would use. You can just hear at each step how he's getting incrementally closer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com