#SUPERCOLLIDER GUI PATCH#

I continued to iterate on the implementation until settling on the one below. While the timing of the chucks is accurate, the tone is not convincing. Synthetic whine and chuck of Túngara frog Recording of synthetic whine and chuck of Túngara frog Below is a recording and spectrogram along with the synthetic whine. Using the same approach as the whine, I used a bank of sine wave oscillators to recreate the chuck.

The first two beeps are approximately 50 milliseconds long, and the third is 40ms. This group of three chucks have different durations, and the last one seems to have a downward pitch contour but not nearly as pronounced as the whine.

Is this sound produced via some sort of formant resonance? What mechanism makes it seemingly harmonic but with a missing fundamental? This is unclear to me, but I can recreate the sound nonetheless! The chucks seem to have their highest peak around 2.75 kHz. We could perhaps model this by using a harmonic tone with a fundamental frequency of ~200 Hz or ~250 Hz, with the fundamental and first few overtones missing. Looking at the chucks in the above spectrogram we can see partials at relatively even spacing. (The higher the harmonic, the less loud it is) Making the ChuckĪfter a few more iterations of refining the whine, I moved onto the chuck. Additionally the upper harmonics are too strong and need to be attenuated relative to their ordinality. First, the slope of the glissando is still too linear, it needs to have more on a exponential (perhaps cubic?) curve to it. This was already sounding better, but by looking at the spectrogram of the synthetic whine some things are obviously still lacking. Túngara “whine” synthesized, first attempt in SuperCollider Spectrogram of synthesized Túngara whine in SuperCollider It also appears to have some harmonic overtones that decrease in intensity (up to about the 5th harmonic) Here is a recording and spectrogram of the first attempt in SuperCollider. Looking at the spectrogram above we can see the “whine” portion of the call is a descending tone, starting around 1kHz and ending about an octave below. The first area of focus was on creating a convincing “whine” using a bank of sine wave oscillators.

I decided to use the SuperCollider programming language so that I had absolute control over the synthesis of this sound. These are much better descriptions in my opinion. At first I referred to these components as the “chirp” and “beep”, but after being clued in by some STRI researchers (thanks Amanda Savage!) I learned to use the terms “whine” and “chuck”. The first being that the frogs make not only this “laser” sound, but also have a percussive sound that follows it. There are many noticeable things from this spectrogram that further inform what we hear. Túngara frog recording with whine and three chucks Spectrogram of Túngara frog recording with whine and three chucks I began by inspecting an isolated call from one frog via the spectrogram in Audacity.

#SUPERCOLLIDER GUI PATCH#

ES2 Logic Pro Patch for Laser Frog Synthesis Lazer Frog Synth attempt #1 Making the WhineĪlthough the first attempt was not convincing enough, it was close enough to encourage me to continue on my quest to synthesize the frogs call.

It captured the general gesture of the descending tone, but didn’t capture the timbre or slope of the glissando very well. I did this based entirely on listening to the frogs before analyzing the spectrogram in detail. My first attempt was a very quick patch using the ES2 synthesizer in Logic Pro. Indeed these frogs sound like a laser beam from a video game, and since I have worked as a sound designer and synthesized laser beam sounds for video games, I thought “I bet I can synthesize these frogs!”. I just really liked the way they sounded and kept listening. I was completely ignorant of them at first, having no idea what their actual name was or anything about their behavior or even what they looked like. I had other plans and project ideas before arriving at DINACON, but I found myself continuously drawn to the sound of these frogs. Túngara Frog in a puddle, photo courtesy of Mangtronix Chorus of Tungara frogs at night in Gamboa Spectrogram of the frog chorus First Attempt One might mistake this biophony for a retro video-game arcade, but it is in fact the revelry of an amphibious Bacchanalia. Once it got dark there was a seemingly ubiquitous chorus of these laser sounds, an asynchronous melange of descending glissandi. Before the sun had even set on my first day in Gamboa I had already heard excited chattering about the sound of the “Laser Frogs”.

Supercollider gui