Concat

A map of sounds, not a timeline

Every slice gets measured: how bright, how noisy, how loud, what pitch, what timbre (13 MFCCs), each as an average and a variation over the slice. That puts every slice at a point in a 36-dimensional space. Concat flattens it to a 2-D map and plays a cloud of grains from the slices nearest your position.

First sound in a minute

1. In Schwung, add Concat to a track. A new Concat loads the first sample of your first Samples folder by itself.
2. To choose your own: open Corpus from the root menu, select Source (knob 1), press the jog wheel, and pick a sample, or a .concat file from Corpora.
3. Scope (on Mod & Set) decides what a picked sample means: File (default) makes that sample the whole corpus, cut into many slices; Folder takes its whole folder.
4. Wait for Analyze to reach 100 %. A big folder takes a minute the first time; after that it loads from the cache.
5. Play the pads. Each pad plays a different part of the corpus.
6. Open View: see the map, and turn the jog wheel through the Recipes. Try Cloud, then Drone.

The corpus on the Move's screen

Three ways in

The pages

The root page holds 8 performance knobs. The menu below it opens View · Corpus · Map · Mod & Set · Grain · Shape · Play · Out.

Root

Corpus

A .concat file's own slicing settings replace Slice Mode, Min/Max Slice and Silence Gate.

Map

Mod & Set

Grain

Shape

Play

Out

Hands on

Eight starting points

On the View page, the jog wheel browses them. A recipe sets play and sound parameters and never changes your corpus.

Build a corpus in the browser, hear it before the Move does

A web page that runs on your Move. Gather folders and samples, trim them, choose the descriptors, see and play the map, then load it onto Concat's track. It runs Concat's own analysis code (compiled to WebAssembly), so what you see is what the Move will compute: the same slice boundaries, descriptors within 0.06 %.

Open it

With the Move on your network (or connected over USB), open this in a desktop browser:

http://move.local:7700/api/remote-ui/module-assets/concat/builder/app.html

It is also one click away in schwung-manager's Remote UI: Concat's track has an Open the Corpus Builder button. If your Move answers on another name or address, replace move.local with it.

Build a corpus

1. Gather. Drag folders and samples from the Library onto the corpus column, or use +. Ctrl+A selects every sample in a folder; drag them all, or press Add. ↑ ↓ step through samples and play each one.
2. Listen and prune. A folder arrives collapsed: open it (▸) to hear its samples one by one and leave some out (✕, + brings them back). Only / Skip take name patterns like *Kick*.
3. Trim. Click a sample: drag on its waveform to keep only that part. Click a slice to hear just that slice. For a sample inside a folder, Trim on its own pulls it out first.
4. Slice. Onsets or fixed grains, min and max length, gate: saved into the corpus file.
5. Choose descriptors. The Descriptors tab shows each one's range, median and histogram, and how much it shapes the map. Untick what you don't want Concat to listen for.

Hear the map

Save and load

Save (Ctrl+S) writes UserLibrary/Corpora/<name>.concat. The header shows which track Concat is on and what it plays. Load on track N saves and makes that track play the corpus, with live progress. After that, every save reloads it on the Move while the old version keeps playing. Unsaved work survives a page reload.

The .concat format

Plain JSON, written by the Builder and readable by hand. Pick one in Source like a sample.

{
  "concat": 1,
  "name": "Night Market",
  "sources": [
    { "path": "Samples/Ahuntsic_Ambiances" },
    { "path": "Samples/MELLOTRON/M300SaxB-20.wav", "start": 0.4, "end": 6.2 },
    { "path": "Samples/DRUMS", "include": ["*Kick*"], "recurse": false }
  ],
  "exclude": ["*click*"],
  "descriptors": { "use": ["loud", "centroid", "flatness", "pitch", "mfcc1-13"] },
  "slicing": { "mode": "onset", "min_ms": 40, "max_ms": 600, "gate": 0.02 }
}

Live reload: when the loaded file changes, Concat rebuilds it in the background while the old corpus keeps playing, and only new or changed files are analysed again (a 9170-slice corpus went live in 8.6 s instead of 76 s).

Concat's panel in schwung-manager

In the manager's Remote UI (http://move.local:7700/remote-ui), Concat's track shows a small panel: the corpus playing and its status, a menu of your corpus files to load, and Open the Corpus Builder. Switch Interface to Default at the top of the track for every knob; the manager forgets that choice when the page reloads.

What it costs

Get it on the Move

1. Your Move runs Schwung 1.3.0 or later.
2. Open schwung-manager (http://move.local:7700) and install a custom module from this repo (filliformes/concat-move), or upload concat-module.tar.gz from the latest release.
3. Power-cycle the Move (Schwung reads module manifests at startup).

When it doesn't

Corpus Builder keys

Made with

Built on Schwung by Charles Vestal and contributors. Decoding with dr_libs (public domain). Algorithms studied, not copied, from FluCoMa (BSD-3) and Diemo Schwarz's CataRT papers on corpus-based concatenative synthesis; the DSP is written from scratch.

Inspired by Mosaïque (site), a corpus-based concatenative synthesizer for Max for Live that lays a corpus out in a 3-D timbral space, made by UdeM's Laboratoire formes • ondes (LFO-lab).

Instrument, DSP and Builder by Filliformes. MIT license.