REAKTOR COMMUNITY

DESCRIPTION

jambient Radr (pronounced "radar," "raider" or "rad-er") is an instrument for dynamically controlling the position of eight sounds relative to a listener. But it could also be used for controlling any other musical dimensions, for example, controlling the pitch and loudness of eight sounds relative to a central point.

As distributed, control and output of the instrument are designed for use with VST Automation in a host such as Plogue Bidule, which can drive the listener position with input from the joystick and use Radr's position outputs to drive X and Y parameters of VST plugins that can do 3d Audio. See pdf. (I decided to do this because there is much better quality available in plugins than in Reaktor, and hey, I didn't want to program it. I am using Spin Audio's 3D Panner Motion Effects-- Radr doesn't do any audio processing itself. I am using this rig in Bidule to spatialize output of my jambient Matrix3.) This finally lets me bring spatializing capacities of my Visual Basic program jambient (www.jambient.com) into the VST world. The instrument could be easily modified for other control purposes.

Using jambient Radr

Click on sounds (the little squares) in the radar screen at the left and drag them to move them around. The larger square represents the position of the Listener. The currently selected sound (or Listener) is indicated in the strip to the left of the radar screen, and the square representing the currently selected sound pulse. If you click on an empty space, the currently selected sound will jump to that position. Click on the strip to select a sound.

Use the Freq and Amp XYs in the Lissajous macro to put the currently selected sound on a 'Lissajousy' path. The relation between X and Y frequencies will determine the shape and complexity of the path. The relation between X and Y amplitudes will determine the expanse and proportion of the path. Use Stepsize to quantize frequencies to get (perhaps) nicer shapes. Use AmpScl to scale all amplitudes down. The path centres around the current position of the sound, so clicking in the radar screen will move the entire path of the currently selected sound.

Snapshots store the position and Lissajous settings for all sounds and the listener. Try recalling the snapshots to get a sense of what you can do. On load, the current snapshot is restored.

Switch to A view to economize on screen space.

Programming notes

This instrument demonstrates using XYs in polyphonic mode, which lets you display multiple graphic objects in one XY--something I didn't know you could do for three years, until smartatron's thread on wireframe graphics appeared in the forum. It also demonstrates a number of nice techniques for using monophonic panel elements to control stacks of polyphonic audio modules, and vice versa. Also shows how to snapshot the state of polyphonic circuits. See jambient SpectralMorphatorium for more on using mono controls to drive poly audio.