Nudist Audio Newsletter #8

Hey audiopolists,

Just in case you haven’t already heard the good news—the Black Friday sale is in full swing over here at Nudist Audio! Nudistort is fully 50% off ($20) until the end of the day tomorrow, December 2nd.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming!

I’ve been thinking a lot about how visualization can help with creative audio development. Below is a graph I’ve drawn for an algorithm I’m working on. This is not a graph of the input audio, nor the output audio—it’s an internal buffer that’s calculated using some math. The audio you’re hearing is actually the sum of all the points on the graph. Imagine tracing down the vertical line in the middle from top to bottom, and adding up all the horizontal distances to each point, and doing that 48,000 times per second. The input here is an electric bass.

I don’t think this will end up in the final product; I often find visualizers like this hurt more than help musical creativity. But for trying to wrap your head around the things you could do to all those little points, it’s an amazing change of perspective.

You can ask yourself: what would it sound like if it looked a certain way? What if you smushed this picture in some way, or flipped it diagonally, or instead of adding all the points together, did something else?

When you’ve been mulling something over for a long time, it’s easy to get caught in the rut of thinking about it in a very abstract and mathematical language. But when you actually see it, plainly laid out in front of you, your brain goes places it would never have gone otherwise.

And for your monthly plugin recommendation, one of the strangest I’ve ever used is Anukari. This is maybe closer to a video game than an audio plugin; the premise is that you place objects in an infinite 3D world, which then vibrate and interact with each other according to the laws of physics. But you can also tune the parameters to be completely unphysical, which creates some ridiculousness. It’s kind of wacky, but I’ve actually found some of the sounds to be really musical. And it’s also made by a solo indie developer! <3

No newsletter next month for Christmas! I wish you a holiday season full of noises.

Cheers,
Caleb