Thonk provides the sonic treasure-chest composers can turn to to harvest fresh, unanticipated material to solve their writers blocks with, without having to think at all.
It is an extremely simple to use Freeware Macintosh application, running native on both 68K and PowerPC machines that produces very diverse sounds based upon a sound file provided by the user, where you have NO CONTROL WHATSOEVER over the process.
Richard Boulanger once commented that he especially liked the narrative quality of Thonks output.
Thonk tends to create fluent, logical, almost improvisatory sounding ‘mini compositions’.
Besides on the algorithms used in the bowels of Thonk, this ‘narrativeness’ depends, as do most aspects of the output sound, on the input file.
Feed Thonk a mono 16 bit AIFF file of any length or sample rate. You will then be asked to save the output file. You now leave Thonk rendering. Thonk runs smoothly in the background and most users have made it a good habit to launch it in the morning and leave it running all through their working day.
At the end of the day you bring Thonk to the front, and quit the process. You now have a stereo AIFF file filled with extremely diverse sound derived from your input material.
Select the best stuff from this completely unpredictable output file for further use in your compositions.
Better yet: if you repeat the process with the same input sound, the result will be completely different from the previous...
System requirements
Macintosh PowerPC or a Macintosh 680x0 with a mathematical coprocessor (FPU), with 1 megabyte of free RAM and system 7.0 or higher.
Inside Thonk
The sound synthesis technique used is Granular Synthesis.
Let the big boys roughly explain what that is about:
All sound is an integration of grains, of elementary sonic particles,
of sonic quanta. All sound, even continuous musical variation,
is conceived as an assemblage of a large number of elementary sounds
adequately disposed in time. (Yannis Xenakis)
Granular synthesis of sounds involves generating thousands of very short sonic
grains to form larger acoustic events. Granular synthesis is a fruitful technique
for the exploration of a different class of computer-generated sound spectra
than those produced by additive, subtractive, or modulation techniques. (Curtis Roads)
Granular synthesis is a sound synthesis model based on the assumption
that sound can be considered as a sequence, possibly with overlaps,
of elementary acoustic elements called grains.
Granular synthesis constructs complex and dynamic acoustic events
starting from a large quantity of grains . (Giovanni de Poli)
Thonk manipulates the following parameters of a self implemented granular synthesis model:
In file time - the place where a grain comes from in the input file
Granular Frequency - the amount of written graines per second at a given out file time
attack and decay time - the portion of the grain that is faded in and out.
Grain length - the length of the grain
Transposition - a statistical four voice transposer of grains
balance - left to right location of the grain
and separately controlled band limited randomisers for all these parameters.
For every parameter Thonk drops a certain amount of randomish values at randomish times in a score. During execution, there is a constant interpolation between these values. The parameters fight for the attention of the listener, while one ear catcher fades to the background another takes over.
Granular frequency can reach values up to 6000 grains per second, while the grain length can become 1/10 of a second, resulting in a maximum vertical density of 600 layers of sound.
The application is derived from GrainDamage, my granular synthesis environment where all the parameters can be tightly controlled from a score, but I have learned that the spontaneity, ease of use, and the surprise element of Thonk is very alluring to composers struggling with the task of ever finding fresh ways to manipulate their sources.
Thonk was written in C, with some valuable help of Peter Bakker.
Operation
1. Create your Input file.
First you have to create your input sound. It has to be a 16 bit mono AIFF file, of any sample rate.
If you have never used Thonk before, it is a good idea to keep this file fairly short ( 5 to 15 sec), with a lot happening inside. This way you can learn best how input affects output in Thonk.
2. launch Thonk
3. Flowing vs Hectic
The only actual control (besides the complete input file of course) is the Flowing vs Hectic radio button. Flowing normally yields slowly evolving textures. When you choose Hectic, generally the parameters within Thonk will move ten times as fast.
Although much care has been taken to take every bit of control out of the users hands, I must admit here that there are actually a few more things you can do to influence the result.
Hint 1: The less transitions there are in the input file, the less there will be in the output. Mind that the length of the file does not matter in this respect, merely the amount of transitions in total.
Hint 2 : The output file will, very roughly, follow the frequency content of the input.
4. Hit ‘Go’
A standard file selector box appears, you now select your input file (16 bit mono AIFF file).
Then a standard save dialog appears. Here you have to save your output file.
When you have hit Save, it is possible that you see a ‘One moment please...’ sign. Don’t panic, this moment can take up to about a minute on slower macs. Then the Thonk Console appears, keeping you updated during the process.
For smoother background performance (Thonk is designed to run in the background of your regular work) more calls to the update window are done when Thonk is in the background, so it looks like Thonk runs faster in the background than in the foreground. Of course this is not actually true.
5. Quit
When you think Thonk has rendered enough output, hit Quit.
You will be asked to confirm this. Thonk closes the output file and quits. You can now play the 16 bit stereo AIFF file Thonk has created. When you do not quit, Thonk stops rendering when it has produced 10 minutes of output sound.
Notes on speed
Thonk runs faster with a disk cache of 512 K or so (in the memory control panel) .
On PowerPC’s Thonk can run well over ten times as fast as on 68K machines.
Always disable the ‘calculate folder sizes’ option in the ‘views’ control panel.
Thonk runs faster in the foreground than in the background.
Speed doubler on PowerPC also speeds up Thonk performance.
Speed depends on the density of the texture being calculated, hence varies greatly.
Q & A
Q: What if I want to listen to the output file without quitting Thonk?
For this, you need the Freeware utility ‘Fix 16bit AIFF’ by Matthew Xavier Mora. This application is on the disk Thonk came on, or you can download it from:
ftp://ftp.best.com/pub/bakalite/daw-mac/
You can probably also contact Mr Mora directly: mxmora@unix.sri.com
This is what you do:
• Go to the finder and select the output file.
• choose duplicate from the file menu.
• Launch Fix 16bit AIFF, hit Fix File and select the copy of the output file.
The AIFF header information is now supplied to the output file just as if Thonk did it itself by quitting. You can now playback the copy without quitting Thonk.
Q: If The Mac crashes or looses power while Thonk is busy, do I loose the output file?
Nope, again use ‘Fix 16bit AIFF’ to fix the output file. (see the above Q)
After restart do this:
• Launch Fix 16bit AIFF, hit Fix File and select the output file.
The AIFF header information is now supplied to the output file just as if Thonk did it itself by quitting normally. You can now playback the output file.
Contact and disclaimer
Contact me
I would appreciate to hear your results or find out about your experiences.
This is where you can find me:
Audio Ease
Arjen van der Schoot
Esdoornstraat 14
3551 AJ Utrecht
Netherlands
E-mail: ease@knoware.nl
Fax: ++31-30-2438500
Legal Stuff
Finder and Macintosh are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
Thonk is supplied as is. Arjen van der Schoot hereby disclaims all warranties relating to this software, whether express or implied, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Arjen van der Schoot will not be liable for any special, incidental, consequential, indirect or similar damages due to loss of data or any other reason, even if Arjen van der Schoot has been advised of the possibility of such damages.The person using the software bears all risk as to the quality and performance of the software.
