Poolside Gossiping about Formant/Vocal Wavetables... New in KRC Mathwaves!

[@APKManagement-rg4px]

Hope no rain hits you this weekend. Have a great time in Palm Springs, and the waves sound so nice.

[@kcrosley]

Hey @APKManagement-rg4px, thanks for watching and thanks for the well wishes! We're pretty sure to get a bit of rain Saturday and Sunday, but whaddyagonnado!? 🤷‍♂ It's still warmer than it is back in San Francisco! 🍸🌴

[@kcrosley]

Pro tip: You might have noticed that the wobble at 1:10 isn't using the formant wavetables. Instead, it's based on some of my VAE (variational auto-encoder) wavetables which several folks have complained about being "samey" and perhaps too "pretty". Well, they are nicely high-energy and, using things like modwave's "Infinite Clip", they make an awesome base for wubstep wobbles and similar sounds.

[@CapriciousBlackBox]

*OH YAH……….OH YAH…….OH YAH*

[@Phantom_Communique]

Hey Keith, thank you so much for your wavetable collections, these are awesome. I’m a novice software developer myself and I’m curious what you do for work? I’m very interested in breaking into audio software development (currently learning C++ and Juce), and I’d be grateful for any guidance you have. Cheers!

[@kcrosley]

Hey @Phantom_Communique, thanks for watching and for the kind comments on the KRC Mathwaves wavetables! Vocationally, I'm a digital marketer working primarily on web and SEO stuff (so I'm a longtime JavaScript programmer). I've been involved with a lot of different technology startups and larger tech companies over the past decades in various tech marketing capacities (corp comms, PR, analyst relations, content marketing, you name it). My education (in the long-long ago) was in Mechanical Engineering and also in English Lit (I'm weird like that). In addition to audio projects like Mathwaves, I also have collections of plugins for the Bubble "no code" web development environment (which I don't spend much time on anymore). I haven't ever tried my hand at VST plugin development, but there are times where I wish that was part of my skillset! With the advent of AI, it's easier than ever to learn new coding skills and it was via ChatGPT (the commercial version/GPT-4) that I really upleveled my Python skills. (99.9%+ of the Mathwaves collection was created using Python scripting.) I had messed around with various Jupyter Notebooks (mostly AI-related stuff like Jukebox) but didn't have much of a grasp on Python and what you could do in it, but it makes things (like file creation and audio processing) so easy compared to other environments. (Of course, you can't build VSTs in Python. But I'm sure that ChatGPT and other LLMs could really help in scaffolding of audio plugins.) Anyway, ChatGPT is my pair programming partner, and after we had created the original Mathwaves collection of waveforms, I was like, "Well, buddy, what should we do next?" and it kept insisting that we could try some machine-learning approaches to novel waveform and wavetable creation. I didn't believe it was really capable of that, but in fact it was and the increasingly sophisticated VAE models that generated all of the VAE wavetables in the collection were the result of iterative work with GPT-4, so it's definitely my co-creator (a lot of that work was done in the time before longer context windows, so it was very, very iterative!). I guess if I were looking to break into audio plugin development, I would aim for creating a couple of simple open source plugins -- they wouldn't have to be fancy, maybe simple FX just to build up a Github repo (which is a big part of what any potential employer might want to see, if that's what you're aiming for... it just demonstrates that you can do the work) -- and then some (again, even if it's simple/not particularly sexy) commercial VST instrument or effect and try your hand at selling it direct to consumers. Not sure if any of the above is helpful, but I enjoy interacting in the comments this way! 🙂