Need a Ticking Sound

[Inventor]

Hi, I'd like to write a metronome application and I'd like to know what is the appropriate sound and how can I make it with ChucK Ugens. I don't want a sample as that would complicate the download process. Also, what should a metronome application do? Different rates of ticking is all I can think of, I've never worked with a metronome.

[Kassen]

The "classical" approach would likely be a impulse into a resonant (bandpass or maybe lowpass) filter. If I had to make one now I'd probably go about it the lazy way and take the Shakers, Shakers can do nice clicks and it's super-easy. Short burst of noise, short oscillator beeps, etc, would all do as well. Keep the sound brief and relatively high pitched so it's more clear what exact moment is being indicated.

That's all that oldfashioned metronomes do; just give clicks at a steady rate.

Modern (digital) ones tend to also give a higher pitched (or louder) click every 4 beats (or 3 when waltzing). When practising all by yourself that's not that useful but it can be when playing to a backing track. If you want to get fancy you could include "swing" or "shuffle", meaning the spacing between the "down" and "up" beats isn't equal.

That's basically all there is to it; metronomes are very, very simple and that's more or less the whole point of them.

[Inventor]

How's this? It ticks once per second.

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Metronome1.ck
Description:	Just a Metronome	Download (listen)
Filename:	Metronome1.ck
Filesize:	871 Bytes
Downloaded:	324 Time(s)

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[dewdrop_world]

As for the sound of a metronome, I agree with Kassen. In an old-school mechanical metronome, the click comes from something hitting something else, and the vibrational modes can be approximated by one or more resonant filters.

A few months ago I did a metronome addition to my tempoclock GUI. It feeds an impulse through three ringing filters in parallel. (No, I didn't make these numbers up -- I tuned them by ear using a different GUI.) I get a nice woody "tock" sound.

Frequencies: 403.06749750304, 2947.8690441738, 992.38941400907
Amplitudes: 0.15740193350554, 1, 0.63826208002513
Ring times: 0.017389599589788, 0.0032695745154834, 0.0098681694619578

"Ring time" is the time it takes the filter's impulse response to decay to -60dB -- supercollider's Klank and Ringz UGens use the ring time instead of Q. I tried to figure out how to convert the decay time into Q but I'm making some stupid algebra error somewhere and I don't have time to figure it out.

hjh

[Kassen]

Indeed, for your wikipedia-search enjoyment; we call this "modal synthesis" because we have filters emulating the instrument's "modes".

If we are going about it properly; a impulse is only a idealised approximation of "a thing hitting a thing", reality is slightly more complicated, for example; using a impulse assumes both objects are perfectly smooth and infinitely hard and inflexible. Such materials -of course- don't actually exist.

Because of this it may be preferable to use a very short burst of noise, we're talking about something that fades in and out in the time of a few samples here. This has another advantage besides realism. When we use a impulse to excite a digital filter the results should always be that filter's impulse response; i.e. always the same. We may as well use a sample. With short bursts of noise the result is always ever so slightly different which should make the final metronome less fatiguing to listen to as our hearing psychology is very good at detecting repetitions that are exactly identical.

I think this may be relevant here in practice as a metronome is likely to be listened to for long stretches of time.

James; you may want to add a unit to your "ring times". A "wood" sound sounds like a great idea to me; I always found the "metal" click of traditional metronomes quite bothersome.

Ah, and once again it becomes clear that if we consider trivially simple questions in enough depth they become quite interesting again :¬).

[Inventor]

[Kassen]

Could be, but the only way to test this would be to find another such object...