Saturday, 8 September 2018

Planets Synth.


Not strictly the Moon but...
    I was listening to a programme on Radio 4 about rhythms, and they used the orbits of the planets as a musical rhythm, so I decided to do the same using an oscillator synthesizer.

    I adapted my old synthesizer written in HTML and javascript that runs through a web browser.

    Firstly I worked out a frequency for each planet proportionally scaled on their distance from the Sun. Because of the huge distances of the outer planets I had to use a different scale for them.

    For the planets' beeps per minute, I worked out a proportional tempo based on the orbits. I found a good tempo for Mercury first (240bpm), then calculated the other planets based on that. Again because of the huge numbers, I have to use a separate tempo range for the outer planets, otherwise the inner ones would have been beeping too fast or the outer ones too slowly.

    Once I had that sounding good I thought it would be great to add modulation based on the number of large Moons each planet had, and also some delay.

    Here is the final result.


    Audio track for looping through a bass amp!

    BBC Radio 4.

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