Programming Sound with Pure Data

Making Sound Move

So far the sounds we’ve made have mainly acted as a support to learning how to work with Pd, but they haven’t been interesting sounds per se. One component of real-world sound we haven’t yet reproduced is movement. Real sounds usually change over time. Whether it’s the gentle undulation of waves on a beach or the wind in the trees, or the dynamics of an impact like two wineglasses clinking together, there’s usually a component of change over time that a sound designer needs to understand and be able to reproduce.

We’ll build two components that produce change over time two different ways. The first is a slight variation on the oscillator we’ve already been using to make sound, called a low-frequency oscillator or LFO. The second ...