Exploring Sound Design Tools: Wormhole

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Today I’m having a look at Zynaptiq’s Wormhole, a quite versatile warping, pitch bending plugin to use on sound effects, voice over and even musical elements.

Interface & Features

Wormhole has a few sections that operate more or less independently. It features the usual BIG wheel/knob thingy that other Zynaptiq’s pugins usually use, which in this case shifts the main warping effect up or down.

So if we look at the plugin’s signal flow, we see that it mainly consists of a warping section and shifting section. Both the dry and wet signals can be then delayed and finally reverb can be added at the very end or just after the main sections.

If we have a nother look at the UI, we can see where each of these sections live:

Warping

So let’s have a look at the Warp section which is the main feature of this plugin. Zynaptiq describes it as “proprietary time-domain local spectrum inversion“. Somewhat similar to a ring modulator but capable of producing unique sounds. Let’s see its settings:

Warp Depth: This adjust the frequency spectrum affected, low values will only affect high frequencies, while higher values will affect the whole spectrum but would give a milder result. To me, changing this value kind of feels like pitch shifting in a way. You can hear some examples here:

Poles: Increasing this value tightens up the frequencies and harmonics generated around an specific pitch while lower values create a more smeared sound. So use higher values if you want a thinned out type of sound. All the examples below where recorded while depth was at 50%.

Tilt: This shifts the whole warped spectrum up or down. So it kind of works like frequency shifting but with formant distorting qualities. This is what we control with the big circular knob.

Filter: This is just a simple low-pass filter than can be used after the warp and poles parameters (Pre) or afterthe tilt process (Post). The pre setting is generally better to create broken sounds, while post will result in cleaner results. Personally, I generally don’t notice much of a difference between pre and post.

Shifting

The shifting section is the other main feature Wormhole offers We find both frequency and pitch shifting. The difference between these two is that with frequency shifting, we are just moving all frequencies the same amount up or down which will results in more dramatic changes for low frequencies, musically speaking but far smaller changes for higher ones. In this sense, we could perfectly shift the fundamental note but the harmonics won’t be in the correct place since they are higher frequency. Pitch shifting, on the other hand, takes this into consideration and moves higher frequencies exponentially further away so the result sounds musical.

Let’s have a look at the settings that it offers so we can understand how it works:

Frequency Shift: It goes from -4000 Hz to +4000 Hz. Yeah, Hz, not semitones since this is frequency shift, not pitch shift. There are two modes here, linear and map. I see that map is the default option as it offers more granular change around 0 while the extremes change pitch in a more dramatic way.

Decay Time: Frequencies that play for longer than the desired time, will be discarded. So at the maximum value, nothing will change but as the value is lower the sound tends to dry out, reverb and noise can be reduced.

Pitch Shift: This is the proper pitch shift section and it uses 4 different modes:

  • Smooth: +/- 48 Semitones, optmized for low transient sounds.

  • Thight: +/- 48 Semitones, optimized for transient heavy sounds

  • Detune A: +/- 48 cents where L and R channels are shifted to produce a widening effect. Tight algorithm.

  • Detune B: +/- 48 cents where L and R channels are shifted to produce a widening effect. Smooth algorithm.

Other Features

We can also find a simple reverb with size and damp controls plus wet/dry controls for each individual section (Warp, Shift and Reverb). These three sections can change in routing order too.

Additionally, there is a blend section that offers something a bit more powerful than a simple master wet/dry mix control. When processing audio, you usually can hear the dry and wet at the same time, instead of a new, unique sound. Wormhole offers you a different way of blending dry and wet as the sound is gradually processed so you can have much smoother transitions and interesting intermediate states. Let’s see the modes it offers:

  • X-Fade: Normal dy/wet mix.

  • Morph A: Uses the properties of the wet signal to create the intermediate states.

  • Morph B: Uses the dry signal as the base, resulting in more subtle blending.

Finally, Wormhole has a delay value so you can blend dry and wet with a timing difference.

Processing Examples

Exploring Sound Design Tools: Igniter

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Igniter is Krotos’ new engine sound design plugin. They have been kind enough to sent me a license to have a look and see what it can offer. Igniter allows you to virtualize vehicle engines (real, sci-fi or fantastic) combining a granular section, a set of synthetizers and two sample managers. It includes performance controls so you can automate the vehicle RPM, engine load and many FX (including doppler) in order to get a realistic sounding engine. It comes with a big amount of presets including sport and utilitarian cars, planes, helicopters, trucks, motorbikes and sci-fi vehicles.

So here is my in-depth look at the plugin features with some examples here and there. I encourage you to follow along in your own DAW, you can find a full featured demo here.

Interface / UI

The interface is clean and easy to read and you can resize the window which is very nice. A main section (left side) occupies most of the screen and includes all the audio sources we can use. These sources are divided into four different tabs: Granular, Synth, One Shot and Loop and also includes a file browser.

On the right hand side we find the engine master on/off switch and the main revs knob in the middle. This revs knob acts as a gas pedal for the whole plugin. At the top, we find the Mod system, where Igniter’s true power resides, since it allows you to dynamically link any parameter within the plugin to the revs knob using envelopes and LFOs. Lastly, at the bottom right side, we find the FX and mixer sections. Let’s see all these in more detail.

If you need more info, most features are well covered in the manual and on Kroto´s videos. What follows is my own take on the plugin capabilities, plus some wish list features that I would love to see in the future.

Granular Section

This is probably the most complex and important generator. It combines granular synthesis with real recordings to re-create a virtual engine with a revolutions or RPM knob that you can “drive”. Each vehicle includes two mic perspectives: engine and exhaust and we can easily mix between both with an slider.

When I saw this, it occurred to me that it would have been nice to also include an interior perspective as this would be very useful for vehicle scenes like chases. After some looking around, I discovered that all vehicles have a “In-car” preset which solves the problem. But this is not a true recording of the car interior, but a recreation of it using EQ and convolution reverb. Would this be too different or unauthentic compared to a true inside recording? To be honest, I don’t know since I don’t have a huge amount of experience doing car sound design but I suspect these presets will suffice pretty well for most applications and, of course, you can always tweak them to suit your needs or even do your own "in-car” processing outside of Igniter.

In terms of how the granular engine actually works, we can’t see what’s going on under the hood (see what I did there?) but I suppose the plugin is using recordings at different steady RPMs and blending them together as you act on the engine. This is similar to the approach used in middleware like Fmod for use in video games. The result is pretty natural and smooth and driving the RPM feels responsive and clean.

For now, you can’t add your own sounds to the granular section, as they would probably need to be edited in a very specific way for them to work here. On release day, Krotos offers 13 different vehicles that use this granular option but I’m sure more will be added with time or maybe made available for individual purchase in the future.

Driving Modes

As you can see on the interface above, there are basically two ways to control the engine simulation: manual and auto. At the same time, every car comes with a set of three presets, two of them are manual and a third uses auto. So, using the example pictured on the right hand side with the Dacia 1310:

-Dacia 1310: “Free” mode that uses manual driving.
-Dacia 1310 Manual Gears: Uses manual driving but with pre-determined gear shifts on the Revs progression.
-Dacia 1310 Auto Gearbox: Uses the auto mode.

Let’s see what’s the difference between these three:

In general, manual mode allows you to freely change the engine’s RPM an also gives you a “load” knob. This parameter simulates if you are putting pressure on the engine or, in other words, if you are applying pressure on the gas pedal or not and allows us to create more realistic sounding gear shifts and decelerations.

The difference between both manual presets is that on the “free” mode, the relationship between the granular RPM and the master rev knob is completely linear by default, so you have to play with the RPM value yourself to imitate the act of shifting gears. Here is a video of me just doing that with a Revs pass first, followed by a Load pass. As you can see, to achieve a natural result, you need to drive the parameters in a realistic way. It would require a bit of practice to follow onscreen action like this but it feels very easy and responsive.

On the other hand, the other preset type, “Manual Gears”, has the gear shifting already soft coded into the mod section, including on load and off load changes. Of course, you can tweak this as you please but the preset gives you a nice starting point. As you can see, in this mode you don’t need to imitate the engine revs with your automation and you can just use curves to describe how hard you want to accelerate or decelerate.

For the most part, this works quite well when going up on the revs but going down forces you to go through the whole set of gears which doesn’t always feel natural, although sometimes you may want this (Formula 1 cars kind of do this sometimes). I tried different ways to avoid this, like staying within the boundaries of the same gear or jumping fast from a higher to a lower point on the envelope, although this needs to be carefully drawn as automation. A potential solution to this issue would be that the RPM ramps don’t occur when we decelerate, only on our way up on the revs knob.

You can also notice how the load drops are already coded into the revs progression, which is pretty handy and also shows that I was too subtle with it on my free test.

The third preset, Auto Gearbox, uses the auto option which doesn’t allow you to directly control the granular RPM or load and simply gives you an slider called “Power” that we can use to accelerate or brake while the gears shifting is hard coded and can’t be tweaked. This would be similar to driving an automatic car.

Here is an example of me using this mode. Compared to the others, it feels a bit unresponsive at the start but once you get speed it works well, although the gear shifting doesn’t always feel “in the right place”. As long as you don’t need very precise and fast changes in RPM, this mode can be useful to get natural results quickly.

By the way, you may hear some clicks and pops on my examples above. I am not sure a 100% if this is coming from Igniter’s or was a internal audio recording problem but definitely the Audi R8 seems to be a bit more “clicky” on the exhaust than other cars I tried later.

Granular Advanced Controls

Lastly, the granular section also includes some other advanced controls:

-Shuffle Depth controls how thin or wide is the slice that the granular engine uses to select the samples. Higher values can help make the sound more natural and varied. Using the mods, you can, for example, make this value go up as the RPM goes up.

-RPM Smoothing: It slows down the response time to the changes in RPM. You can try increasing this if the engine feels too wild or decreasing it for a more fast response, which could be useful on auto mode.

-Idle Fade: Use this to adjust the fade between the engine on idle and low revs.

-Crossfade: It controls the blending between different grains or audio slices making it more abrupt or smooth.

-Lim Threshold & Kick: The documentation doesn’t cover these two but I suppose they are related to an internal limiter.

Synth Section

It includes 5 oscillators with two different waveforms each that you can blend together. You can also control the frequency and gain of each of the oscillators. There is frequency and amplitude modulation available for each oscillator plus a vibrato option.

And that’s pretty much it. Sounds basic but it is indeed powerful as you are able to link any of these parameters to the master rev knob creating dynamic designs that will grow in intensity and speed as the revs go up. You can also combine synth layers with real engines to create hybrid engines that combine real recordings and synths.

Here are some examples of sci-fi designs I did from scratch. Something that I missed is more options for the noise generator. it would be great to have more noise colours to create textures with or maybe a filter to shape it. The ability to apply separate FX to different oscillators would also be amazing.

One Shot section

This tab allows you to trigger certain individual sounds on specific moments on the rev progression curve. Maybe the most obvious use for this section is to trigger tire skids when we go up on the revs or screeching breaking sounds when we go down. In any case, this section is great to add sweeteners and flavour to the design.

There are four slots where you can drag and drop sounds. Unlike the granular engine, you can use your own sounds here and drag and drop them from finder. Each slot can be monitored independently and there are individual knobs to control volume and pitch. Both of these can also be controlled with an envelope instead of a knob, which offers interesting possibilities.

On top of the sample area there are four “timelines” each of them corresponding to one of the slots. Here is where you can choose when do you want the samples to be triggered but the horizontal axis doesn’t represent time but rev progression. In other words, you get to decide where in the acceleration curve you want some samples to be triggered.

Directionality is also accounted for. You can trigger samples as the revs go up or as the revs go down depending of where the triangle is looking. You can also have a sample that will be triggered both ways (diamond shape) and stop currently playing samples on the slot (square shape).

In general, the system is clever and nice to use but I feel that you’d really need some playlist and randomisation controls to make it really powerful. My idea would be to basically turn each of the slots into something like an fmod event. This way, you could add a playlist of sounds and control how to cycle through them or randomly jump between them.

This will give you a much richer system, where you can use sets of skids, terrain or engine pop sounds to choose from each time the event is triggered. For this to work well, you should be able to choose how deterministic the system is, in case you need predictability. Being able to tweak or re-shuffle the samples that were triggered after a pass would be also a good approach. I know Krotos is working on a run-time, middleware version of Igniter, so maybe something like this is already in mind.

Loop Section

Although the one shot section includes an option to loop its samples, this tab gives us much more power and control of sounds that need to be looped. It can be used in conjunction with the granular system or just by itself to create a completely new vehicle system.

This is pretty powerful. It allows you to have your own responsive car design, provided that you have recordings of steady RPMs to use. You can also use the loop section it to add texture or detail to the granular generator. You can add things like gravel, dirt, snow, clattering, squeaking or engine pops and link their intensity to the master revs knob.

You have four slots for loops and you can control their volume and pitch. The interesting and very handy thing is the section on the upper side. It allows you to customise how you want to blend your four loops together giving you the tools to smooth out both the crossfades and pitch changes between the transitions.

To obtain a good result, you need to make sure you have audio clips that loop cleanly. The Amp section helps when determining the boundaries between the clips but I miss more control on the actual volume of each of the sounds when I need to balance them out. I’ve noticed that actually some of the factory presets use the mod section to control this by using the general gain of the whole looping section but this strikes me as bit left field. Shouldn’t I be able to control the gain of each sample with the amp section? A gain parameter independent of the crossfades is needed here, I think.

On the other hand, the Pitch section is very nice to have and it works well. It would be amazing to actually being able to analyse the pitch of each of the samples and get a “suggested pitch curve”. This could be just an starting point so you can then tweak them by ear later.

The workflow in the loop section is a bit odd since you can’t hear anything unless the main engine switch is on but then if you switch it on, the first loop triggers so you can’t hear what you want to hear in isolation unless you manually mute the first slot. It feels kind of odd. Additionally, when building the loop progression, sometimes a slot doesn’t emit sound and you need to manually hit its play button. Kind of annoying.

So here is an example where I’ve built a Peugeot 307 engine from library recordings. For sure, the result is not as smooth as the granular presets and it sounds a bit “processed”, it’s like you can hear the artificial pitch bending too much. There are also many dropouts in the audio level and I don’t know if this is my fault or if there is a way to remedy that. The factory presets that use the loop system are cleaner than this but I can still hear some dropouts on those so maybe this is a bug?

As for the sound in general, it depends on how you drive the RPM and I assume creating a robust and good sounding vehicle system takes more sample preparation and tinkering than my quick test took. I was also thinking that maybe I chose the incorrect range of RPM loops and I missed having more slots so I can use more RPM states and make the progression smoother.

Browser

It is used to choose and monitor samples for the granular, one shot and looping sections. The tagging system is very nice. Igniter includes a nice selection of different engines and sweeteners, many cars also include recordings of doors, horns or wipers ready to use. I’ve noticed that you can’t drag and drop these sounds from Igniter to Pro Tools, which will probably be my first instinct if I just want a car door sound on the DAW’s timeline. The alternative would be to have the sound on the One shot section and either trigger it via Pro Tools automation or via the timeline system.

Other than the factory sounds, you can also use the “Files” tab to browse around your own computer files, including external drives, which is very nice.

Something I’ve noticed and is a bit counter-intuitive, is that in order to preview a sound on the browser, the engine button needs to be on, maybe that’s the case because that button just mutes the whole plugin internally but it took me a minute to figure it out.

Mods

As I have mentioned before, this is a very powerful and important section of Igniter and probably the one that I liked the most. It reminds me of Propellerhead’s Reason where you can flip the rack and apply envelopes and LFOs to any parameter in the system.

Basically the mod section allows you to link any parameter within Igniter to the master revs knob. You just need to drag the name of the desired parameter and drop it on the mod area. Then, you can edit the envelope that will govern this behaviour and also use an LFO to add some randomness or movement to any of these relations. The range or scale of the change can be adjusted with the sliders that appear to the right of each parameter. There are 8 mod slots so you can create very different envelopes and very complex systems.

By default, the RPM within the Granular section is inked linearly to the master revs and from there, you can link all sorts of other stuff, including FX, to make the engine more dynamic and responsive. Have a look at the presets to get some ideas of what you can do with this, it really allows you to get creative.

I was also thinking that it would be very nice to be able to use the mod section on other things than the RPM. As an experiment, I tried to turn the master revs knob into a distance knob, decoupling it from the granular RPM and linking it in several ways to volume, reverb and EQ.

Why would I want to do this? Because controlling the distance and perspective between shots is probably one of the most time consuming things to do in a vehicle scene. My experiment kind of works although when you do this, you loose the ability to link other stuff to the vehicle RPM. So, for a really powerful, all in one, vehicle design tool, I would love to have 3 master parameters: Revs, Distance and a maybe a third custom one. This is maybe outside of the scope or workflow that Krotos had in mind but that is at least how I would try to design it. Of course, you can create a similar effect just on your DAW but using this method you are able to link many things at once to the “distance knob” like engine/exhaust mix, granular FX, reverb sends, etc, speeding up workflow massively.

FX & Mixer

This section is pretty straight forward, nice to use and clean. You can control the level for each of your audio generators plus you have an FX send and Pan pot. While the sends and FX are pre-fader, the Pan is post fader. Each section has a rack with 5 slots where you can hook up FX. The FX that we can use are:

-EQ: Very nice parametric EQ with everything you need. Works great.
-Compressor: Very good too, with a gain reduction meter and a limiter mode.
-Limiter: Simple and clean dedicated limiter, useful to make sure you don’t saturate the output at high RPMs.
-Saturation: Good for adding some extra nastiness to an engine with extensive controls and colour presets.
-Transient Shaper: An unusual addition to a plugin like this since engine sounds don’t have many transients but it could be cool to use to add or remove dynamics to the granular section or on sweeteners.
-Flanger: Nice for sci-fi designs.
-Noise Gate: I suppose it could be useful if you have a noisy recording on your one-shot section.
-Ring Mod: Pretty cool and alien sounding and a nice addition for creating sci-fi stuff.
-Convolution reverb: Very good to have to recreate distance or an “in-car” sound. The controls are quite simple but you probably don’t need much more. I miss more outdoors IR in the factory library.
-Doppler: Very nice if you need to quickly cover passbys. You can control it independently or attach it to the main Revs knob. Passby presets are already created for each vehicle which is very handy.

General Workflow

In terms of workflow, Igniter allows you to create the engine RPM movements in a very quick and flexible way and of course, you can always come back and tweak the automation to make it work better. Additional passes controlling other parameters (like load) can add extra realism and detail.

The loops are nice to have since you can, for example, make any car go on gravel or dirt, for example, with just adding a loop layer to the granular. The one shots are not that useful, in my opinion, since you can only have five individual sounds and you can’t assign probability or playlists to the triggers, so every time you pass through them on the RPM curve, you would hear the same exact sound. The way it works right now, I think you would be better of just editing sweeteners like skids manually on your DAW the old-fashioned way and use Igniter for the engine itself but I’m open to be wrong about this.

You would probably need two instances of Igniter, one for exterior shots and one for interiors, unless you want to do the interior treatment outside. Once you have the basic RPM behaviour down, you would then need to mix it into the scene with fader work, pan and distance attenuation. That’s why I was thinking that it would be cool to have a dedicated master distance knob so you can tweak this in one go once you find a reverb that works with the scene. With these system I’m imagining, you would do an RPM pass, a distance pass, some tweaks here and there and you would be done for that car. Rinse and repeat.

Lastly, it’s also important to mention that Igniter offers a multi output so you can get an individual signal from each layer and mix them in any way you want in your DAW. This is very much appreciated.

Is Full Tank worth it?

Krotos offers an expanded version called “Igniter Full Tank” which includes all the unprocessed and processed recordings used to build all the presets. You get a lot of coverage for every vehicle in Igniter plus loads foley and sweeteners. The recordings are a great library just by themselves (75 GB of additional audio) and in combination with Igniter will allow you to cover every single detail and sound you may need. To clarify, these extra sounds come as separate audio that you can then browse within Igniter, but they don’t include new presets or vehicles.

Conclusion

I hope both you and me now have a good understanding of how Igniter works and what it can offer. I had a lot of fun testing the plugin, Krotos keeps giving us innovative tools to create custom, unique soundscapes and I feel that with them we can offer much more value to our clients because the result is unique and personal.

Above all, the granular system sounds great and I know how hard is to make interactive engines sound good. I’m sure more content will come for the plugin in the future and maybe some workflow quirks will be fixed with time. As for the features I’ve been suggesting, they are just my own take on how I would improve the software’s workflow and capabilities and since I’m sure some concepts and perspectives have escaped me, I will remain open to new and better ways of using Igniter as it spreads across studios worldwide.

Thanks for reading!

Exploring Sound Design Tools: Sound Particles

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Sound Particles allows you to create soundscapes and sound design using virtual particles that can be associated with audio files. The results are then rendered using virtual microphones.

If you want to check it out or follow this review along, you can download the demo here. It has all the features of the paid version but is limited for non-commercial projects only.

I won’t explain how to use the software in depth but I will give an over overview and show some practical uses for everyday work in sound design. If you want to get a more in-depth explanation, you can also watch this tutorial.

Sound Particles interface. Nice, clean and responsive.

Features Overview

The heart of the program are the particles. You can basically create them in three different ways:

  • A Particle Group will create any number of particles at the same time in an area or shape of your choice.

  • A Particle Emitter creates particles over time at a particular rate.

  • A single point source is just a single particle.

By default, particles are created as soon as you hit play, although you can also choose to change the start time to delay their creation. Generally, they last as much as the length of audio file attached to them.

You can choose the coordinates used to create your particles and also move the individual particles around the scene to create different effects. Particle emitters can also be moved. The movements that you can apply to the particles stack with each other, giving you an amazing amount of options to create motion. Keyframes can also be used to match any movement to a reference video.

See the video below for an example with the three types of particles:

So in the video you can see:

  • A particle group (red) that generates particles in a square shaped area. These particles are not created at the same time because we have also applied a random delay. They have fireworks sounds attached.

  • A particle emitter (orange) is moving in a circular motion while the particles that creates also have some small random movement. They have magical sounds attached.

  • A single point source (pink) with my voice paulstreched to infinity.

You can also apply audio modifiers to each particle group. These will randomize certain parameters so you obtain more interesting and varied results. If you think about this, this is similar to how audio works in the real world. Each time you take a step, your shoe makes a slightly different sound: pitch, level and timing will be different. Sound Particles lets you randomize the audio from each particle in a similar way. The audio modifiers are:

  • Gain: Basically, audio level.

  • Delay: This determines when the particle is created. It is very useful because usually you don’t want all particles in a group to be created at the start. In the example above, the red particles are being created with a random delay.

  • EQ: It applies different filters and bands of EQ to each particle so they don’t sound exactly the same.

  • Granular: This is kind of a special modifier. It slices the audio file and then plays each slice from a certain particle. You can control how long the slice is or even leave it random. You can also control if the slices are then played in sequence or at a random order.

  • Pitch: It applies a different pitch shifting value to each particle.

For any single parameter that requires randomization, you can choose different probability distributions to get the result that you want. An uniform distribution (all values have the same weight) and a normal distribution (most values will be around the mean) are probably the most useful ones. You can even create a custom distribution which is pretty awesome.

Uniform Distribution

Normal Distribution

Of course, once you have the particles ready, you need a virtual microphone to capture the result. On this area, the amount of options are simply amazing. Not only you can place the microphone anywhere in the scene but you can choose between many configurations including M/S, X/Y and all sorts of surround and ambisonic configurations.

If that wasn´t enough, you can also create several microphones on the same scene and render different stems per microphone. These stems can contain different combinations of particles so you can have more control later on the mix.

Finally, the project settings page allows you to control how Sound Particles is going to manage sound propagation and attenuation from distance. You can change the speed of sound, simulate the delay of far away sounds, change how much sounds attenuate with distance or wether your scene uses the doppler effect.

Microphone configurations can follow a variety of speaker setups

Project Settings

Sound design examples

Enough with the theory, let´s hear some real applications. Since sound particles is much easier to understand when you see the particles in movement, I decided to create a video for every example instead of just audio.

Battlefield soundscape

This is very simple but could be very useful if you need create a soundscape and don´t want to move every single sound into place by hand. As you can see, is very easy and quick to create a randomized soundscape. Something I feel I miss here is a bit more control on which sounds are triggered. When you have different types of sounds, it would be nice to be able to trigger some sounds only occasionally in the same way you can do this in fmod or wwise.

It would also be helpful to be able eliminate a particular particle that moves too close to the mic or at least be able to prevent them to getting too close without using complex custom distributions.

Scifi Interface

Now let’s imagine we are building a somewhat cheesy 80´s computer interface with beeps and blops and some folders flying around the screen.

As you can see, we are using two particle systems at the same time. One of them (blue) creates all the beeps in a circle around the listener while the orange is a particle emitter that throws particles horizontally to simulate things flying by.

Playing with pitch

Let’s explore how we can use the pitch randomization feature to create new, complex sounds from simple ones. On this example, I first use a uniform distribution for a more detuned and unsettling effect. We can also use a discrete distribution so the jumps in pitch are strictly within certain semitones, obtaining a more musical result.

As you can see, just changing the distribution can produce very different results.

We can also automate pitch to create dynamic effect like for example making all the frequencies converge on a central one. The THX deepnote was achieved with a a similar method.

Granular synthesis

This modifier offers many sound design possibilities. You can see an example below of building some sort of alien speech sound step by step.

We can also obtain a “voices in my head” effect by slicing up some speech and distributing it around the listener. As you can see, we can always re-create the particles to obtain a new variations which is very handy for video game work.

Doppler Effect

There are many plugins that recreate a doppler effect but this one for sure offers a unique visual approach. As you can see below, we can create a doppler effect on a single particle or on many.

Conclusion

I hope you found this software interesting, I think is a very good tool to have in your arsenal and I feel I have barely scratched the surface with the sonic possibilities that offers. I believe there is an update coming soon for Sound Particles and I may have another look then and write a new post covering the new features.

You can also have a look at a couple of plugins that Nuno Fonseca, Sound Particles creator has released. They allow you to use the doppler and air absorption simulations that Sound Particles has but in a convenient plugin that you can use in your DAW.

Exploring Sound Design Tools: Mammut

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mammut.png

Mammut is a strange and unpredictable piece of software. It basically does a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of a sound file but unlike Paulstretch, which uses slices of the sound, Mammut uses the whole thing at once, creating more drastic results.

Mammut is not (in any way) a commercial tool but more of an experimentation one, so I won't go into detail about what is doing under the hood. Instead, I will focus on how it can be used to create interesting and cool sound design. If you want to follow along, you can download it here.

Software Features

Mammut has many processing tabs but I will only cover some of the most interesting ones.

Loading & Playing sounds.

Mammut works as a standalone software. You need to load a sound (using the browse button) to be able to start fooling around. The "Duration Doubling" section adds extra space (technically, FFT Zero Padding) after the sound. This extra space give some of the effects (like stretching) more time to develop and evolve.

Play and stop the sound on the Play section. There is also a timeline of sorts. Now that our sound is loaded, let's see what we can do with it.

Stretch

It creates a non-linear frequency stretching with frequency sweep effects. All frequencies are raised to the power of the selected exponent, so small changes are enough to produce very different results. Because of the frequency sweeps, it sounds quite sci-fi, like the classic star wars blaster sound. Here are some examples at different exponents:

As you can hear, as the values get further away from 1, the effect is more pronounced and it also starts sooner. Here are some results with values higher than 1:

And here are some interesting results with a servo motor sound.

This sounds remind me a bit of japanese anime or video games, maybe this could be one of the steps for achieving that kind of style from scratch.

Wobble

This stretches and contracts the frequency spectrum following a sinusoidal transfer function. You can control the frequency and amplitude of this change.

This one is weird (no surprise) and it doesn't really do what I was expecting. It tends to create sounds that are increasingly dissonant and "white noise like" as you go to more extreme parameters. Here are some examples:

Threshold

Quite cool. Removes all the frequencies below a certain intensity threshold. This means that you can kind of "extract" the fundamental timbre or resonance of a sound. Used on ambiences (3rd example below), it sounds dissonant at first and then, once you remove almost all frequencies, kind of dreamy and relaxing.

Block Swap

This one basically divides the frequency spectrum in chunks and interchanges their halves a given number of times. Hard to wrap your head around but it produces interesting results. First, the number of swaps seems to make the sound more "blurry" and abstract as you can hear:

Then, the block size seems to create different resonances around different frequencies as you increase it.

Mirror

Simple but hard to predict. It reflects the whole spectrum around the specified frequency. The problem with this is that when you flip the spectrum around a low frequency, everything ends up under it and is mostly lost. On the other hand, if you use a higher frequency, too much of the energy ends up on the harsh 5-15 KHz area.

A couple of examples:

Keep Peaks

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This one doesn't even have controls or an explanation on the documentation. It seems to extend the core timbre of the sound across time which can be pretty useful. When using this option, the duration doubling function is specially handy.

Conclusions

Mammut is certainly original and unique. Since it only works standalone and is rather unpredictable and unstable, I don't feel it would be very easy to include in someone's workflow. Having said that, is definitely a nice wild card to have whenever you need something different.

Exploring Sound Design Tools: Reformer Pro

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Kroto's Audio Reformer Pro is a unique tool for sound design. Here is a look at the software from a practical everyday perspective. I will focus on how it can improve your workflow and also on how it can spice things up on the creative side when doing sound design. I encourage you to grab the demo version and follow along.

Technology

Basically, Reformer takes an input (another recording or a live microphone signal) and uses its frequency and dynamics content to trigger samples from a certain library, creating a new hybrid output.

reformer diag.png

In other words, it allows you to "perform" audio libraries in real time like a foley artist performs props.

Versions

Reformer uses a freemium pricing model and comes in two flavours, vanilla and pro. The first one is completely free but only allows you to use certain official paid libraries. These can be purchased on the Krotos Audio Store where you'll find a huge selection of different libraries.

The pro version uses a paid subscription model and offers more advanced features. This is the one I'll be covering on this post. This version allows you to load up to four libraries at the same time and do a real time mix between them (the free version only allows to load one library per plugin). More importantly, it also gives you the power to create your own Reformer libraries using your sounds.

Interface

As you can see on the right hand side, Reformer Pro controls are quite simple and self-explanatory. Nevertheless, here are some features worth mentioning:

Since you can load four libraries at a time, the X/Y Pad on the left hand side of the plugin will allow you to mix and mute them independently.

The Response value (bottom left corner) changes how fast reformer is processing incoming audio. In general, faster responses work better with sudden transients and impacts while slower values will work better with longer sounds. If you notice undesired clicks or pops, this is the first thing you should try to tweak.

The Playback Speed functions as a sort of pitch control allowing you change the character and size of the resulting signal.

Reformer Workflows

As you can see, Reformer offers an imaginative way of manipulating sounds but how can this be helpful in the context of everyday sound design and mix work? Here are some ideas:

  • Sync: To quickly lay down effects in sync with the picture using your voice or some foley props. For example, covering a creature's vocalizations by hand is always very time consuming and on these kind of tasks is probably where Reformer shines the most.

  • Substitute: Imagine you have all the FX laid down for a certain object or character and now you have to change all of them to a different material or style. In this case, you could keep the original audio, since it has the correct timing and use it to drive a reformer library with the proper sounds.

  • Layer: Once you've stablished a first layer for a sound, you can use reformer to add more layers that will be perfectly in sync with no effort.

  • Make the most of a limited set of sounds: Sometimes you find the perfect sound to use for something but you don't have enough iterations to cover everything. You can create a reformer library with these few sounds and, playing with the playback speed, response time and wet/dry controls, get the most of them in terms of different articulations and variations.

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Creating your own libraries

Reformer Pro includes an Analysis Tool that allows you to create custom libraries with your own audio content. I won't go into much detail about how to do this since the manual and this video covers the topic perfectly and the whole process is surprisingly fast and easy. I encourage you to try to create your very own library too.

Ideally, you should use several sounds that follow a sonic theme so you can have a cohesive library. At the same time, these sounds need to be varied enough in terms of frequency and volume content so you can cover as many articulations as possible.

From a technical standpoint, make sure your files are high resolution, clean, closed mic'd and normalized.

As an example, I created ghostly, sci-fi monster voice library using sounds I created with Paulstretch (see my tutorial for Paulstretch here).

You can hear below some of the original samples that I used to build the library. As you can hear, I tried to mix different vocalizations and frequencies:

And here is how the built library behaves and sounds when throwing different stuff at it. The first sounds are the result of monster like vocalizations and you can hear how the library responds with different combinations of timbres. The last sound on the clip is interesting because is the result of the library responding to a ratchet or clicking sound. As you can see is always worth trying to throw weird stuff at reformer to see how it responds.

You can find this library ready to use for reformer in the link below and give it a go:
Ghostly Monster Reformer Library.

Reformer as a creative tool for sound design

In my view, Reformer is not specifically designed for creative sound design as it lacks depth in terms of how well you can manipulate and control the final results. I miss having some control on how the algorithm creates the output signal in a similar way Zynpatiq's Morph plugin has it. But again, I understand sonic exploration is not the main aim of Reformer. Having said that, you can still achieve interesting designs mixing together elements from different kinds of sounds.

For example, we can use a recording with some interesting transients, like a rattling noise to drive some different libraries. Here is the result with a bell:

As you can hear, Reformer takes the volume information and applies it to the bell timbre. And here is a hum and the same rattle creating some sort of fluttering engine or mechanical insect sound. Just for fun, I also added a doppler effect to add movement:

Being able to control any sound with your own source of transients opens a huge window of possibilities. For example, you could use a bicycle wheel as an instrument to perform different movements and articulations. Pretty cool.

I'm just scratching the surface here. There are many more creative ideas that I would want to try. The demo version only runs for 10 days so make sure you can really go for it during those days.

Conclusions

Reformer is a very innovative tool that for sure makes you think in a different way about sound design. Being able to sync and swap sounds on the fly is probably where Reformer shines the most, allowing you to perform recorded libraries live as a foley artist would do. Definitely worth a try.