Swarm Harmony

So a couple days ago, I discovered a synth called The Swarmatron, which Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross used on the soundtrack for The Social Network. The video of them talking about it can be seen here.



Naturally I wanted to emulate this sound so I did what any poor student what do and sought to rip it off. Since i did not possess the skills to make one I instead opted to use Max MSP to emulate the basic desirable functions.

I decided to use my Theremin as the oscilator because it has a better tone than anything I can create in Max and its important that the user be able to manipulate pitch and harmony simultaneously. As a result of this I created the harmonies using pitch-shifters, which I made with the help of this video.


Finaly I created the ratios needed for the divsion of pitch and amplitude amongst the harmonies and "hey-presto!", one swarm harmony patch.

It does produce a lot of artifacts though so thats definitely somthing i'll have to work on, though i quite like that it sounds like its been recorded onto vinyl. Anyway, i'll upload a demo as soon as i work out the best way of routing the audio through everything.

x