phase inverter - Kyma Forum

Tips & Techniques

phase inverter

Post New Topic Post A Reply
profile | register | preferences | faq | search

next newest topic | next oldest topic

Author	Topic: phase inverter
Frank Kruse Member	posted 02 January 2001 15:36 Happy New Year! Today i needed a simple setup that reverses the phase on one channel of a stereo signal. sounds stupid but i wasn´t able to find a module in kyma that does this. after fidling around for 1 hour, I did it with WaveLab in 2 seconds :-( how about an M-S decoder? Has someone made one? Any hints? Thanx. Frank. IP: Logged
SSC Administrator	posted 02 January 2001 17:51 You can find the phase inverter in the Stereo Placement file in the Surround & Spatializing folder in the Kyma Sound Library. It is called "phase Flipper". Or you could just take an Attenuator and change Left or Right to be -1 (leaving the other channel set to 1). What do you mean by "M-S decoder"? IP: Logged
Frank Kruse Member	posted 03 January 2001 01:13 An M-S Decoder turns an M-S Stereo Recording into an x-y stereo signal. Mid-Side Stereo is recorded using a figure of eight mic and some directional mic like a cardioid. It has the advantage of being 100% mono compatible and you can control stereo width without leaving your console. It´s very popular in film sound. x=(M+S) y=(M-S) you can decode by using 3 channels of your console. split the s signal to 2 channels and flip the phase in one channel pan both s channels left and right mix the m signal to both left and right. now that i know where to find the phase flip, i´ll make one and post it... frank. IP: Logged
Frank Kruse Member	posted 03 January 2001 01:24 P.S.: This simple phase reverse problem i had shows the biggest problem i have with kyma. as we say in germany: "sometimes you can´t see the the wood because of all the trees around you." in kyma you have to know exactly what every sound does and how it does it to be really creative and quick especially when know what you need. i think in some cases there are so many sounds that can actually do the same thing but are a lttle bit different (like all the disk player sounds etc.). why not just the stereo generic source? why must there be a mono version one that only plays disk tracks, one that does just live input etc. etc.? IP: Logged
oivindi Member	posted 03 January 2001 04:59 I agree with Frank. I can´t really see the point of having four different GenericSource Sounds, when the only difference between them is "mono, disk", "mono, ram", "stereo, disk", "stereo, ram". It takes 1/10 of a second to choose these options within the GenericSource itself. Making four different GenericSources only fills the Prototypes strip with unnecessary Sounds and makes things less "overviewable" than what was the case before. More categories doesn´t necessarily make thing easier. What I´ve wanted for a long time: a customizable Prototypes strip (yes, I know I can make my own from scratch, but I want to modify the existing/original Prototypes strip). Shouldn´t this be a rather simple thing to implement? /Øivind/ IP: Logged
pete Member	posted 03 January 2001 06:56 An important point here is that Kyma is Dynamic and being improved at an alarming rate. What is inevitable is; as time goes on people will want modules to work in slightly different ways, but if they just change a module then everyone who used that module in an old job would not be able to reproduce that old job . Therefore we end up with more than one module to do a very similar jobs. If you buy an akai or roland etc. sampler, the manufacturer has set out exactly how it will be used and you have to use it that way. Kyma could be a polished and well flushed out system that leaves us with only the modules that are current and work the same way as every other manufacturer, but then they couldn't add to it out of fear that it might become untidy. Kyma is capable of synthesis that hasn't even been thought of yet and as such; has no known protocols. Therefore, you could get what seems to be a mess but you are actually entering a constuction site that is kyma land. I've had a lot of work from the sound morphing capablilities of Kyma. I don't want to have to wait for some manufacturer to come up with a machine which has a button that says morph on it, and when it is pressed, it does all the work. I would be waiting a long, long time. I love Kyma, warts an all Pete Johnston IP: Logged
SSC Administrator	posted 03 January 2001 09:38 At different times during the development of Kyma, we have sometimes gravitated toward consolidation of modules and sometimes gravitated toward specialization of modules. One of the goals of the current version, Kyma.5, was to speed it up by making it less necessary to edit the parameters of the modules for certain common situations. For example, if you want a stereo disk player as your source, you can simply drag it from the Prototypes and go. You do not have to pause to double-click it and change the check-boxes. That's the reasoning behind it. It's simple to create your own customized Prototype strips by opening any Sound file as a Prototype strip, and you do not run the risk of inadvertently losing some prototypes you might need later (a risk you would run by editing the system prototypes). When you have over a thousand sounds in the library and hope to add even more to that collection, then the issue of how to search that library becomes more and more important. One solution would be to make it easier to see the wood by cutting down most of the trees. We don't like that solution, because we believe that would be an insult to your intelligence. Instead, we would rather provide you with a compass, maps, a GPS, and a water bottle so you can navigate and explore through the woods with confidence. That's one of our projects for the next version--to provide more navigation and searching tools. In the meantime, it will always be true that any time you can invest in familiarizing yourself with the prototypes and sound library examples will pay off later in terms of your facility and fluency in the heat of production. That's true for any piece of equipment, any software, or for that matter any musical instrument. IP: Logged
dennis Member	posted 03 January 2001 12:32 Kyma is certainly wide and deep! And it shows all the signs of evolutionary-style development, e.g., the Constant Sound, which isn't usually. So here's a couple of ideas: 1) How about a "Prototype Strip Lite" that contains a small number of basic Sounds with orthogonal purposes? This would serve beginners by not overwhelming them, yet illustrate the power in Kyma of combining (and recombining) basic sounds. Sort of like the simplified menus of MS Word. 2) How about us Kyma users putting together a "Kyma Cookbook"? After all, using Kyma is like cooking food yourself instead of being served at a restaurant. I see the Cookbook as a set of tips and techniques that we've found useful. Like the "Use an Attenuator to invert the phase" tip, most or all could be explained in words. We could decide on a common format and heavily index the information. I'd like to see it primarily as hardcopy so I could leaf through it for ideas, etc. but available in on-line form. I'd contribute! Anybody else interested? IP: Logged
David McClain Member	posted 03 January 2001 12:52 Count me in!!! - DM IP: Logged
pete Member	posted 03 January 2001 13:52 Hay dennis I like the idea but I think that is what this part of the forum is surposed to be about. But of course most of the text here is dealing with comunication and not just the raw tip or technique. So of course the tips get burried in a mass of text. I wonder if there is a way of marking clips of text that could automaticly be gathered up and thrown into its own pages. This would be good if people other than the auther decided if it should be marked or not. I never know if a tip I give is too basic and obvious , to complex or even simply wrong info. heres a few examples:- 1) The "Product" module means "multiply" 2) When you multiply a signal with a constant number it is the same as changing the volume. If the number is >1 it is louder. if the number is <1 it becomes softer. If the number is a minus number it has the same level output as the positive number but the signal is inverted. 3)If two different audio signals are multiplyed together the result is ring modulation. Questions 1)Does anyone find this useful? 2)Does everyone know this? 3)Do the people who don't know this give a damm? 4)I'm I totally wrong about the multiplication? 5)Does my spelling or lack of it offend? What do you all think? IP: Logged
Frank Kruse Member	posted 03 January 2001 15:30 pete: i think all kyma users don´t have a problem understanding your remarks. the main problem is, that you have to know that for phase flipping you have to use the attenuator because only a few sounds allow us to turn the phase by entring -1. why can´t i enter -1 in the mixer or even in the stereo disk player? what i mean is, there isn´t a sort of standard set of options every sound has. for example: allmost every sound is scalable from 0 to 1 but some can be scaled from -1 to 1. why not make a standard. im working with about 10 different types of workstations every day. i don´t know all their menus by heart but when i open the menu i know how to get what i want. in kyma i find myself reading pages and pages of documentation just to flip the phase. of course some kyma gurus out there look out for a couple of delays or what ever to make a filter, but people like me would first look for a filter sound. Kyma is a great machine and i respect the efforts that where made to develop it. Maybe i haven´t done enogh with it yet... Sometimes it´s just really frustrating to build a car from thousands of basic parts with the help of a 600 pages manual. But then i think: what if the next director i work with wants his main actor´s voice granulated and waveshaped by an arctan wavetable? thank good i own a kyma! (i hope he doesn´t want his phase flipped) ;-) frank IP: Logged
pete Member	posted 04 January 2001 06:27 hi frank Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought that any module that has a scale param will accept a -1 and do an invert. The only reason that you need to use the atennuator is because you want the left and right signals to be controlled independantly. I think this is one of the areas where standardization is already in practice. IP: Logged
dennis Member	posted 04 January 2001 09:40 Hi Pete! - Yes! That's exactly the kind of info/tips that I think are useful to compile. Let's try using this part of the Forum to collect these. I think you make a good point about losing the tip in the communication. Perhaps we (or the Symbolic Sound folks) could periodically collect a "Best of Tips & Techniques". Here's two tips from me: 1) Sometimes I 'disable' part of an expression by using quotation marks. Say that I a have a trigger expression like (!Trig1 + !Trig2) and I want to test it with only !Trig1. I 'comment-out' the part I want to deactivate so it reads (!Trig1 "+ !Trig2"). Then it's easy to put back to the original after testing by removing the " marks. I use this technique a lot when debugging complicated expressions. I also use a lot of real comments in expressions so later on I can remember what I'm doing. 2) If you type Control-B to find a Sound, you can leave the pulldown box empty to select the last Sound you found. For example, say that you're in the Sound Editor and you need to insert a couple of Attenuators. You type Control-B, the Find Sound window pops up, you type "Atten" and click OK. The Prototype strip pops to the front with Attenuator selected and you insert it in your Sound. Now, you can type Control-B and click on OK without entering "Atten" and the Prototype strip pops to the front with Attenuator selected. It saves a bit of typing. Did I explain this clearly? It's easier than it sounds... Hi Frank! - I think you make a good point on standardization. Sometimes Kyma "just growed that way" and so it suffers from some inconsistencies. Unfortunately, imposing a uniform standard (canonticalizing it) is a huge effort and will probably break old Sounds. I suppose sometime it will be have to be done, though. But I can wait... IP: Logged
kelvin Member	posted 04 January 2001 11:51 Hi all, I would love to see a tips and techniques "cookbook" that maybe could be updated. Online in a printable format would be fine to me. And as far as some tips being obvious, or not useful to some users, I read books full of stuff that is of no use to me, or I all ready know, in order to find the things I need. I'm sure we all do. So my vote is for it. Kelvin P.S. Spelling errors don't bother me. I make plenty myself. It's been a while since I was in school. IP: Logged
SSC Administrator	posted 04 January 2001 16:48 Frank et al, please check out the M-S Decoder Sound just posted to the Kyma Sound Exchange area. Then perhaps we could continue the discussion on M-S encoding/decoding as a new topic, and also start a new string to continue the "cookbook" discussion which is also interesting. IP: Logged

All times are CT (US)	next newest topic \| next oldest topic
Administrative Options: Close Topic \| Archive/Move \| Delete Topic

Contact Us | Symbolic Sound Home

This forum is provided solely for the support and edification of the customers of Symbolic Sound Corporation.

Ultimate Bulletin Board 5.45c