Recreating Bubble Sounds in MaxMSP

Laura Papke's icon

Dear Community,

I have been experimenting with recordings of bubbles in Max but realized due to recording quality that recreating bubbles might be a better option. I have already done some research and found out that apreggiators might be of help. I am curious if someone has already explored this field or might have a hint for inspiring patches, vts or tutoriala for something like that?

Thank you very much!

riccardo dapelo's icon

Two patches that generate bubbles, taken from a collection titled "Sound Design Practical Series -Nature", which I don't remember where it comes from.

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.
Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

Laura Papke's icon

Thank you Riccardo! That was exactly what I was looking for. Also, I just googled "Sound Design Practical Series -Nature" and found the two links below, in case other people are interested ;).

Iain Duncan's icon

Hi Laura, in case you're not familiar with it, Andy Farnell's Pure Data book "Designing Sound" is fantastic and all about procedural generation of sounds like that. It's written for Pd but porting the patches to Max is pretty easy. Great book!

Oh, I see your top link is to the patches from it. I highly recommend the actual book! :-)

Laura Papke's icon

Hey Iain, I just did. Looks indeed fantastic! Thank you very much! :)

riccardo dapelo's icon

So I'm starting to understand that, since I'm a serial collector of max patches, somewhere, I don't remember when (some files have a creation date between 2011 and 2014), I found all the code examples that are at this link (in the practical series chapters): https://aspress.co.uk/sd/index.html ported to Max. I don't know the guy who made them, but it's a great job. If someone is interested I can share them.

Pedro Santos's icon

There's also a bubble synthesizer in Max's Package Manager: Sound Design Toolkit

Iain Duncan's icon

Hi Laura, if you are ok with a fair bit of math (I'm still working up to it myself, ha) another great resource along similar lines is Perry Cook's book "Real Sound Synthesis for Interactive Applications". it's a lot more theory heavy, but really good, covering making simulations of real world sounds with various forms of synthesis.

riccardo dapelo's icon

There is also the percolate package, based on Perry Cook's models(STK), which has wuter~, a nice droplet generator, and other interesting generators.

Laura Papke's icon

Hey Riccardo, I just went on that page and listened to an example recording of the various bubble sounds. If you would be up for sharing the max patches that's would be really amazing ☺️!!!

Laura Papke's icon

Guys, this is truly fantastic, thank you so much for your hints <3. Just installed the packages ! Will start exploring everything and also start reading "Designing Sounds" by Andy Farnell. Perry Cook's book will follow ;).

riccardo dapelo's icon
Sound Design practical series.zip
zip

Here's all that files of the practical series

Laura Papke's icon

Thank you Riccardo :)

Ben Bracken's icon

Also, for something already built, check out abl.dsp.bubble~ (new in Max 9).