Not sure where to put this, so: General.
I’m playing around with humanisation. I wanted to make a live-coded piece using MIDI control of Logic Pro X. Originally I tried ProTools - but ProTools started having response issues when I sent it a lot of MIDI on multiple tracks.
I was working on a loop that would take a description of a guitar chord, and play it back using a fingerstyle guitar pattern and an acoustic guitar sound on a DAW. However, the lack of humanisation made the result sound very mechanical. Mechanical seems to work with synth sounds, but not with natural sounds it sounds bad.
The following is me playing around with humanisation. I use normally distributed errors, and specify my drum pattern as an array of rings and individual values. Describing all of: the drum sounds played, their times, typical velocities, and the standard deviation of errors for the times and velocities.
When played using built-in samples, the result is still quite mechanical sounding unless I increase the size of the errors, and make the drums sound extremely poorly played. When I set it to output MIDI and use drum kids in Logic, they sound more humanised, and I had to reduce the average size of the errors.
I’m not sure if going to the effort of making the timing and velocity errors normally distributed was worth it.
I’ll post my code here. Are there things that I’m doing wrong, or inefficiently. Note that I know that .is_a?(Numeric) is undocumented. Is there a documented method of achieving the same effect? How do others achieve humanisation?
#
# Calculate a normally distributed random number with mean and standard
# deviation
#
define :boxMuller do |mean=0, sd=1|
pi = 3.14157
u1 = rrand( 0, 1 )
u2 = rrand( 0, 1 )
return mean + sd * Math.sqrt( -2 * Math.log( u1 )) * Math.cos( 2 * pi * u2 );
end
#
# humanise a value, most likely time or velocity, by adding
# normally distributed 'noise' to it. Numbers are constrained
# within a minimum and maximum, and may be rounded to an integer
#
define :humanise do |value,dev,min,max,integer=false|
nvalue = value + boxMuller( 0, dev )
if nvalue < min
nvalue = min
end
if nvalue > max
nvalue = max
end
if integer
return nvalue.round
else
return nvalue
end
end
#
# Play a drum pattern to use the above
#
use_bpm 127
use_midi_defaults port: 'iac_driver_bus_1', channel: 10
set_mixer_control! limiter_bypass: 1
use_debug false
#
# A data structure. First element (ring) of the array is midi notes
# Second element is typical velocity for each note.
# Third element is typical time that the note is played.
# Fourth element is standard deviation of velocity.
# Fifth element is standard deviation of time.
#
#
pattern1 = [ (ring :bd_haus, :sn_dolf, :bd_haus, :bd_haus, :sn_dolf,
:drum_cymbal_closed, :drum_cymbal_closed,
:drum_cymbal_closed, :drum_cymbal_closed ),
(ring 100, 90, 80, 90, 90, 70, 70, 70, 70 ),
(ring 0, 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 0.5, 1.5, 2.5, 3.5),
10, 0.01 ]
pattern2 = [ (ring 36, 38, 36, 36, 38, 42, 42, 42, 42 ),
(ring 100, 90, 80, 90, 90, 70, 70, 70, 70 ),
(ring 0, 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 0.5, 1.5, 2.5, 3.5),
3, 0.01 ]
#
# choose the sample or MIDI based pattern
#
pattern = pattern2;
#
# use this to switch humanisation on or off.
#
set :human, true
#
# Actually play the pattern. With or without humanisation.
#
live_loop :drums do
sync :loop
human = get :human
veldev = pattern[3]
timedev = pattern[4]
pattern[0].length.times do |i|
samp = pattern[0][i]
vel = pattern[1][i]
time = pattern[2][i]
if human
vel = humanise( vel, veldev, 0, 127, true )
time = humanise( time, timedev, 0, 8 )
end
at time do
if samp.is_a?(Numeric)
midi samp, sustain: 0.125, velocity: vel
else
sample samp, amp: vel / 127.0
end
end
end
end
#
# metronome loop
#
live_loop :timing do
cue :loop
sleep 4
end
)