A Look At "Visualizing and Animating a Spectral Waveform" - Part 1 (Oscillator CHOP)

TOPIC: Oscillator CHOP
TARGET AUDIENCE: People Who Clueless About Sound

From what I know, earlier versions of TouchDesigner was built mainly for visual installations, VJ-ing, building synths, and interactive art projects. And because of this, somehow, sound represents an unique integral part of TouchDesigner. So it is quiet important to understand elements related to "sound". ANd in this post, I will try my best to explain certain CHOPs related to sound. I too admit that I am not really musically incline, so at times music and sound is quiet foreign to me. But to appreciate TouchDesigner, understanding sound is a must. So let's begin!

Since this particular video is still fresh in my mind, we will go through it but I will provide little snippets that may help you understand better, especially on the oscillator CHOPs .

Visualizing and Animating a Spectral Waveform from Wuestenarchitekten on Vimeo.

To download the .toe file, go to the forum page here.

Let us evaluate what is happening up till the 4th min in the video.

IDP1 (click to download a .tox file) - In this example, for oscillator1_CHOP, I have set a waveform that is of a triangle type and has a base frequency of 80Hz. This 80Hz will now be my fundamental frequency. As such, I will choose oscillator2-3_CHOPs to be harmonics of 80Hz.
f = 80Hz
Harmonics of f = 2f, 3f, 4f...
Therefore oscillator2_CHOP = 2f = 180Hz, (same goes for oscillator3-4). Crossing harmonics will generally result in a "better" sound. In the vimeo video above, the arpeggiator is constantly changing the base frequency.

oscillator5_CHOP shows how the bias affects the peak of the triangle waveform. You will be able to see the peak move from left to right due to having a bias of -1 to 1. Connect oscillator5_CHOP to an audioout1_CHOP and you will be able to hear the sound "move".

The last example that I would to point out is the use of the Pitch Control Input.
oscillator6 is being connected into oscillator7's Pitch Control Input. Looking at oscillator6, i have set the base frequency to 0.1.
f= 0.1
T= 1/0.1 = 10s
Therefore oscillator7_CHOP's pitch will vary from 1 to -1 and back to 1 again in 10seconds.

DAT (Data Operators)

DATs are just as important. Most common utilized DATs would be a Table and Text DAT. C-programmers alert! This is just your thing!! MAybe. =)

SOP (Surface Operators)

SOPs are surface operators.

CHOP (Channel Operators)

CHOPs are channel operators. A good analogy would be to think of these guys as the engine that will run your car. Design a better algorithm and understanding the cook time to enhance performance, and you would have a Ferrari engine. Design a bad engine, and hey, a Hyundai isn't so bad. You get my point.

TOP (Texture Operators)

TOPs are Texture Operators

Operators

Okay, the next 4 pages will list all the Operators that are currently available in the FTE version. I'm displaying them all here cause I think that one day I might find the Operators page useful. Crazy huh? On a site note, I'll be putting the same stuff on a google site soon. It feels more "professional" to have it on a google site. Do not be daunted by the vast number of operators. THink of them as your friends, cause you are gonna be best of friends with some of the operators. If you have done the tutorials in the previous post, you would have been exposed to the more common operators.

I & TouchDesigner

Hi!
So basically, I'm on an internship to learn and understand more on this cool software, TouchDesigner (henceforth will be known as Touch). I'm hoping that I'll get to cover and provide examples on all the operators that Touch has to offer and post them in this blog. This way, you will learn together with me! I'll try to make this blog as simple, funny (I would like to think that I'm a funny guy but I may be wrong!), entertaining, etc, etc for everyone.

You may be asking, like what the hell is this guy talking about abt? what is TouchDesigner? The next paragraph will explain what Touch is all about and the potential and real-time capabilities that it can offer. Even better if you have basic knowledge in Houdini as Touch is almost similar but also totally different. Less words and more hands-on approach with Touch and you will totally understand.

Here is a page to understand better the capabilities of Touch and how applications can utilize the real-time "engine" in Touch. SO what are you waiting for? Install Touch (use the latest experimental built in the download page as I am using version 5647) on your machine, register with Derivative to get a FTE-license-key and lets get started!

Initially, I would seriously recommend that you go through these tutorials in this particular order:

• Basic Things To Know About Touch
• Particle Tutorial With Marc & Jarrett (This tutorial was built using an older version of Touch. Despair not for I have created new .tox files for each session and it can be found in the Derivative's forum page)

Once you have gone through these tutorials, you can rest your mind for a little bit and when you are ready, we will continue to the next post!