Coming To Audulus – The Math Expression Node (Teaser)

math-in-audulus

Developer Taylor Holliday teased this image today of a new node coming to Audulus, the multi-platform software modular audio app.

The new module is the ‘Math Expression Node’. This looks like it could be very interesting, because there is so much math underlying music and synthesis. Pitch, scales, time, rhythm, timbre – they all can be expressed as math. 

Details are to come; no release date has been announced on the update.

Audulus is available for iOS and for OS X.

22 thoughts on “Coming To Audulus – The Math Expression Node (Teaser)

  1. Very cool. One of my favorite things about pd is the [expr] object. Nice to see something like it in audulus. Hope it can handle audio as well as control signals.

      1. Taylor

        Can you explain how you’d use this?

        Coming from a hardware background, I’ve never seen anything like this, ring modulators excepted.

        1. Hey Alissa, sure thing. Lets say you want to convert between MIDI note numbers and Hz (according to a standard chromatic scale). Then you’d use the formula: (440 / 32.0) * 2.0 ^ ((x – 9) / 12.0), where x is the MIDI note number. An Audulus user wanted to do that the other day and it required wiring up a bunch of math nodes and ended up being not particularly readable. But with the expression node, you can just enter the math textually and its all in one node.

          Or maybe you’d like to specify a curve for velocity response. Audulus has some modules to do that graphically (the Mapper and Spline nodes) but dropping down to a math expression gives a lot of control.

          Another application (for audio signals) would be to create an interesting wave-shaper or distortion. Or you could even use the expression as an oscillator waveform. Lots of possibilities 🙂

          Hope that helps!

          cheers
          – Taylor

            1. Hey TJ, Audulus just scans the math for the variables and creates inputs automatically. So in the picture, it finds x,y,z and then creates an input for each. (In Audulus you can see the input names by holding down a button on iPad or hovering the mouse on Mac… for the expression node I may actually show the names at all times to make it more explicit)

              cheers
              – Taylor

  2. My guess is that the inputs on the Node are the X,Y,Z values and can be constantly changing, even at audio rate.
    The Audulus forum is filling up with some real experts on this stuff who are always willing to lend a hand when I get stuck!

  3. All these posts about Ipad software feels generally tiresome to me. I think iPad is a toy for kids, not for professional musicians. Please give us some slack…

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