Phase vocoder for live performances

Community Ideas for Ardour
#1

Hello, everybody out there!

To give you some context, I am making contemporary music, notably electroacoustics music and my platform of choice is GNU/Linux. I am quite impressed with the qualities of Ardour.

Now, the announced clip launching capabilities announced for Ardour 7 interest me. I am using Antescofo for real-time live score following, allowing to make several automatic treatments. Especially, using a phase vocoder, you can time stretch an audio file in real-time, making it follow the human interpretation. I can make Antescofo running inside Ardour with Pure Data and Camomille, which will allows changing the pulsation in real time. Is it planned to add some phase vocoder to Ardour, so using it, it will adapt with the interpretation of human performers?

Best regards.

#2

My apologies, I made it unnecessarily obscure.

Actually, the question is quite simple: is it planned for Ardour 7 some real-time time stretching?

#3

That’s still not a well-defined question. 7.0 will already do real-time stretching of launched clips so that they follow the tempo map. But I suspect that this not what you mean.

#4

Well, it sounds good!

Rather than trying to make a better question, I will try to give more details on what I want to do.

Nowadays, I am using Antescofo to follow human performers. Doing so, I get in real time the actual tempo the performer is playing at—of course, this tempo varies during the performance. Using SuperVP, the phase vocoder made at Ircam, I can in real time stretch audio files that are part of the composition, to make them follow the human rather than ask the human to mechanically follow the audio file—also, it is often quite difficult to get the tempo by listening to those files.

This works quite well, but there are two problems. First, SuperVP is proprietary. Second, I would like to use a MIDI controller (such as Push 2) to choose what audio file to launch during the performance, rather than using a single linear audio file. I could program this with Pure Data or Max/MSP (but this does not run on Linux), but there is still the problem that SuperVP is proprietary, and anyway it will be way easier to use Ardour.

Therefore, I would like to use Antescofo to detect the actual tempo, send it to Ardour, and I will ask Ardour to time stretch the audio clip to match the tempo.

Hoping this is clear enough.

Will it be possible to do so?

#5

Well, I guess the reason there is no answer is nobody can give any more information. Anyway, I try one last time to revive this topic.

Here is another way to formulate what I am asking: will Ardour 7 time stretch in real time audio clips when being externally sync?

#6

In theory, it is possible that Ardour 7 could do this. However, you’d be the first to try.

You’d need some way to control tempo in the program, and that’s not entirely obvious under the conditions you describe.

#7

Well, with Antescofo I can control the MIDI clock.

Anyway, the conclusion is Ardour 7 will be able to do real-time time stretching on audio clip. So it will probably be able to do what I want to do, but I will have to test it, and it cannot be guaranteed yet. Good, I will try this as soon as I can.

I guess this solves this thread. I will keep you inform when I will have tried this.

Thank you for taking some time to answer me and for trying to understand what I wanted to do.

#8

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