MAX/MSP Patch for Making Wind
I needed about ten minutes of a spooky wind for "Off the Beaten Path," but couldn't find a good recording. I first tried making some wind sounds with my mouth, but found I couldn't sustain the sound for long enough. The thought of manually editing a string of my ten-second samples into a ten-minute wind was not appealing, so I dug up one of the filter patches we worked on in Audio Art to adapt it.
The patch was already feeding white noise into a filter, so I figured I could automate the frequency parameters to simulate howling.
I used the "drunk" object to randomly walk through numbers between 0 and 128 and then scaled those numbers two different ways to drive the filter and cycle frequencies. Initially I used a resonant filter type, but I found that the wind hissed too much. To get a lower, moaning wind, I tried sweeping the frequency of a low-pass filter instead. After tweaking the frequency ranges, I duplicated the wind generation and routed it to the left output channel so I could make a swirling stereo wind.
Since I need to burn this file onto a CD for the show, I connected an "sfrecord~" object to the outputs of the wind generators and then let it run for ten minutes.
