Audulus: Nord Modular killer??
Mark John Williamson, aka, Junklight (Twitter, Youtube, Bandcamp) just did a very flattering vlog about Audulus. It’s a little long, but worth watching all the way through. It’s a wide-ranging talk about software modulars and has a demo of Audulus in it as well.
Williamson loves software modulars, and the Nord Modular in particular. Since the Nord Modular has been out of production for a while, he’s been looking for a suitable alternative that works at “the right level” as he puts it: not too low-level, but not too fixed-architecture at the same time.
The latest version of Audulus appears to have hit the sweet spot for him.
The Nord Modular software UI
What Williamson might not have known is that @taylor, the creator of Audulus, was inspired by Nord Modular when creating Audulus. Taylor has one himself, but wanted something with a more advanced and flexible user interface (UI).
The infinite canvas of Audulus was inspired by the infinite canvas of the in-house software Taylor was working on at Pixar, his former employer. You can read about it in this Synthtopia interview that Taylor did back in 2015.
If you enjoyed Williamson’s video, make sure you check out his music. The first album on his Bandcamp page is a beautiful ambient work with a conceptual background to it:
The Falling - a people of a distant island who believe that they are the incarnation of spirits who fall from the sky above their island. They live their brief, hard lives and then their spirits head to the eternal sea.
My wife came in from the other room after playing it for a few minutes and say, “Oh what’s that? It’s so pretty!”
If Williamson is not on the forum already, hopefully he will be soon! Seems like he’d be a valuable contributor to the Audulus community.
Notes on the video
These are little things I found in the video that bear some response. It’s not Williamson’s fault at all - I need to do better at making the documentation more accessible and understandable.
- You have to have at least two separate modules or nodes to zoom out and experience the infinite canvas in its full glory. This is done so that you don’t get lost when you’re first building a patch and suddenly your initial module or node gets swiped off screen and you get lost.
- What Williamson calls a shift register is the 1D Chaos Decay module. It’s an envelope generator that has 8 decay outputs. There is an internal chaos generator that moves a point around in 1D space (along a line) and when that line crosses into each 1/8th section, it triggers a timer-based decay envelope. The modules reference details its operation here (use cmd+f to search in your browser for the title of the module).
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He accidentally wires the Sample & Hold module backwards here. The clock module should go to the input with the green light (the universal indicator of a gate input) and whatever you want to sample goes through the top input. Also, the Noise module he uses is a bipolar
-1 to 1audio source. Only0 to 1signals should be attached to knobs.
