| The CDP system is one of
the most comprehensive and innovative sound design suites available. Largely
designed by English electro-acoustic composer Trevor Wishart and reflecting
his musical aesthetics in many ways, its processes cover almost every aspect
of sound manipulation you've ever heard of and many that you probably haven't,
often from an original and musician-oriented viewpoint. |
|
| Traditional areas of sound-processing
are covered very fully: for example, there are 45 filtering functions including
a user-defined bank with time-variable pitch, amplitude and bandwidth.
You can extract an envelope and choose among 34 reshaping functions, then
apply the result to any of scores of time-varying parameters throughout
the system. You can extend and re-order sounds in at least 18 different
ways, exploring functions with names like Drunk, Weave, Scramble, Shred. |
|
| But it is in the less usual
areas that the CDP really stands out from the crowd: very many functions
are
available to shape sound in the frequency domain, including several types
of morphing. Pitch can be extracted from audio, manipulated in up to 10
ways then combined with formant data to re-synthesize sound. There is a
very comprehensive granular section, including multifile sources, pan,
pitch-shift and timestretch parameters, plus the capacity to manipulate
grains by reversing, repositioning, shuffling, duplicating them etc. Pitch
and frequency can be altered in several unusual ways, including retuning
any sound to any desired pitch set, stretching or shrinking the harmonic
space and creating inharmonic frequency shifts. The Texture suite, with
its randomised choices within user-controlled constraints (such as a fully
defined motif, rhythm or chord), lies somewhere between a sophisticated
arpeggiator and a fully-fledged algorithmic composer, and is really a program
in its own right. |
|
| On the information and data
manipulation side, you can view and extract from soundfiles down to sample
level, including a useful spectral display, plus pseudo-soundfile displays
for pitch and formants. A large proportion of parameters can be time-varying
and this data can be manipulated in Soundshaper or CDP's graph editors
and applied to other functions. In addition, there are around 100 functions
for altering and creating tables of figures: everything from simple mathematical
operations to specifically musical ones such as tempering, motivic rotation
and change-ringing. |
|
| CDP is backed up by a very
detailed HELP in HTML format; every parameter is carefully explained and
the underlying concepts and uses for each function are also discussed.
Further support is available from Trevor Wishart's book Audible Design,
which places the processes he has devised in the wider context of sound
composition. |
|
| For details of the CDP software components,
see the
Composers'
Desktop Project website . |
|
Last updated: 22nd November 2007 
