User Actor: initializing values

[Bill Cottman]

I created this user actor and I cannot initialize the values of the frequency, freq width and freq slope for each of the sound frequency watchers inside. What am I missing??? Thank you.

BC five band sound frequency watcher.iua3

[bonemap]

@bill-cottman

Hi Bill,

I did not have any issue with the 'initialize' property settings in your user actor example on my system. However, I was curious about how you arranged your 5 frequency bands. I looked at emulating your user actor and created a 7 band user macro to test the frequency ranges: frequencies patch. Actually, I have made user macros like this before but I wanted to follow your example. I found that I could not calibrate the range widths of the the Frequency Watcher for the lower and the upper bands based on these recommendations: audio spectrum

I used a simple formula to find the centre frequency for a band and then used the 'frequency width' parameter to define the upper and lower limit of the frequency range for that band - is that how you would do it?

I did not go as far as incorporating the 'frequency' slope property in a formula, but it appears that it may be useful for reaching the full range of possible frequencies in only a few bands.

Someone may have better insight into calibrating these ranges than I do. Obviously more bands over the full frequency range are going to make it easier to create finer segmentation and fewer frequency overlaps.

The issue for me is that the minimum band width of the Frequency Watcher is locked at 100Hz and is therefore already wider than the frequency range recommended for ‘Sub Bass’. In addition the Frequency Width maximum locked at 5000 Hz range does not cover all of the frequencies in the recommended ‘Brilliance’ band.

We could make a feature request to @mark about extending the min and max ranges of the frequency width of the Watcher actor- or adjust the widths to fit the limits of what is currently possible with the Frequency Watcher actor.

Anyway here is a user macro that fits the frequency width limitations of the Frequency Watcher into slightly modified frequency ranges: 7 Band Audio Frequency Analysis

Kind Regards

Russell

[Bill Cottman]

@bonemap

The five band approach was based on a chart I got from IRN somewhere on the web. After studying your reply, I realized I did not have a working understanding of how frequency width and slope is used in the sound frequency actor. I built another izzy patch based on the seven bands defined in the Youtube video you referenced. 

Seven Band Audio Frequency Analyzer.izz

My plan is to work with this patch for awhile to get an understanding of how it responds to different kinds of audio stimulation. Then I will create a user actor that will become my Audio Frequency Driver for use in creating visualizations stimulated by audio. 

Thank you for your comments.