Collision/Corpus and Tension, the Endless Material:
One of the biggest revelations I found in generating material for this project has been the Collision, Corpus and Tension plugins. These are physical modeling synthesizers, meaning they use advanced mathematics to recreate the sound of interacting with physical objects.
Collision/Corpus simulates interacting with percussive instruments, namely beams, kalimbas, membranes, plates, tubes and pipes but with different excitators. In the case of Collision you have the choice of a simulated mallet with different changeable parameters and/or a noise oscillator simulating rubbing or scraping the object. Corpus holds the same materials but uses audio input as the excitator.
Tension simulates string instruments with various changeable parameters. You can choose between your excitators bow, hammer, bouncing hammer and plectrum, and these have various parameters to modify. You can choose settings for dampening as well as a simulated finger termination of the vibration. You can choose the virtual pickup microphones position. Finally you can pick which type of body the virtual instrument has. You may choose between piano, violin, guitar and a "generic" body and settings such as its size, decay and filtering.
The complexity of the sounds that are being generated with these plugins, as well as the complexity of creating the sounds in comparison to a more traditional synthesizer, means that the devices are more unstable than the other synthesizers developed by Ableton and therefore incredibly ripe for generating unexpected sounds. At times the Collision/Corpus device will simply stop generating sounds and have to be reloaded, making it a device that satisfyingly pushes against its own seams, often bursting them.
A good starting point for the Collision/Corpus-devices is to push the brightness knob up 100%, the inharmonics knob down to -100% (this in particular seems to be something that will immediately render very glitchy sounds) and the coarse pitch knob down -48 while playing at the very bottom of the Ableton piano roll. You have now set the device up so that any sound that comes out by definition is not one that uses the range intended to emulate real objects.
From here it is play. Only using this setup can create quite wild sounds, for example by dragging around the circle controlling both decay length and material (which controls whether low or high frequencies decay first to simulate the behaviour of different types of material).
While Collision provides you with two oscillators, the user can create further layers with the Corpus effect. These can be made more interesting by layering effects and then finishing the chain with the Corpus.
If one is to analyze what is happening and gain slightly more control, it is important to remember that each oscillator acts as an exciter for the next, with it responding to the exact nature of the excitation. Therefore, a single oscillator generating very fragmented clicks can become a much richer sound if simply followed by something that responds more richly to it. With this knowledge you can better start to realize what is desirable to change at which part of the chain.
An example I encountered was a moment when I was unable to understand why me quickly turning the inharmonics knob from -100% to 100% on oscillator 1 was causing a sound to gradually build. It was at this moment I realized the actual complexity of the physical modeling programming. As oscillator 1 was very softly exciting oscillator 2, oscillator 2s material was responding like a material being excited in this way would in real life. This is something that was unacheivable by simply using MIDI notes to ”hit” the object with the excitator.
Tension is somewhat of a different beast, owing to how sensitive it is towards velocity. As one is able to crank up velocity in several locations, one can easily make it so that every hit becomes an overdriven screech. Here limiting the signal is very important.
For a signal filled with moving overtones one can put the body of the instrument as XS. As I was playing around, the instrument at points broke and began self-oscillating noises and buzzing. The modulation could create evolving sounds on long signals. Finally the bouncing hammer setting could lend interesting rhythms towards abstract sounds. In general I consider this an instrument ripe for processing. It has slightly less aural variation than Collision/Corpus but much more interesting internal rhythm.
These methods are even more endless in character than other methods. The sounds can vary from glitchy sounds to pure tones and heavy bass sounds, giving it a depth that can potentially fill out a whole practice. These instruments are also ripe for processing, to be mixed with the other methods. Flattening the signal works very well here, and with the Corpus the layering can simply continue.
