Programming Sound with Pure Data

Controlling Volume

Now that we’re making sound, remember that if things don’t sound quite right you can quickly turn the sound off by unchecking DSP in the main window. It’d be nice to have a better way to control the volume right there in the patch, though. Let’s look into a few ways to do that.

Using Operators

Since a signal is, at least when represented digitally, a stream of numbers, we can also multiply the signal by 0 to make it send a stream of zeros, or silence. To do that, we can use a signal operator in Pd. Pd has both arithmetic operators, which work on scalar values, and signal operators. You’ll recognize each right away because they look like operators from your favorite programming language, like +, -, *, /, and so on. As always, ...