High quality audio morphing effect plugin, why it doesn't exist yet?

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cron wrote:Mammut is great, but can't do audio morphing as far as I'm aware. It has some nice options for creating and combining spectra, but as it FFTs everything into one giant window it's not the best choice for effects which evolve over time AFAIK.
You're right, I was thinking of convolution.

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It's great for convolution. I recall reading somewhere that it sounds very nice with convolution due to there being no windowing artifacts, but I'm not sure how that manifests audibly as I haven't made any direct comparisons.

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Edit:
Ack! Can't believe it (Prosoniq Morph) was right there in the first post. Jeezow my eyes are getting bad. :(
Last edited by gnu23 on Sun Feb 24, 2013 6:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
We shall see orchestral machines with a thousand new sounds, with thousands of new euphonies, as opposed to the present day's simple sounds of strings, brass, and woodwinds. -- George Antheil, circa 1925 ---

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I've been trying DiscoDSP Vertigo I must say it's quite an amazing synth.
Just load your 2 wavs, the morphing feature is linked to the modwheel
Et voila!
Well, It's not Kyma of course but, it's really cheap and sounds good.
Recommended and added to my wish list

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gnu23 wrote:Prosoniq Morph? It's not free and it's Mac only, but it can do a decent job...

http://www.prosoniq.com/www/morph_AU.html

Have you ever wondered if it is possible to seemlessly morph from one sound to another? To create those stunning effects when an object slowly changes its shape to become another object, but only for sounds? Remember how much fun it was creating new faces from photographs of your friends, trying to get a glimpse of how children may look like from the faces of the parents? Now you can do the same with your favourite sounds! PROSONIQ morph is the world's first realtime audio morphing plug in for your preferred platform.

morph creates seamless sound morphs between two different input sounds. Includes highly intuitive 2D control to dynamically morph between input sounds, fully 32bit floating point operation in real time, SOLO functionality, high quality Reverb, parameters fully automatable and morphing parameter controllable via MIDI by an assignable MIDI controller.
Look at my very first post in where I started this thread...

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gnu23 wrote:Edit:
Ack! Can't believe it (Prosoniq Morph) was right there in the first post. Jeezow my eyes are getting bad. :(
According to the Prosoniq site it's $199 but audioeffects.com sells it for $129:

http://www.audioeffects.com/morph.html

Still not free, but more reasonable.

Victor.

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Pretty expensive, for the kind of poor results it renders in term of audio quality. Already tried it and I was very disappointed.

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VicDiesel wrote:
gnu23 wrote:Edit:
Ack! Can't believe it (Prosoniq Morph) was right there in the first post. Jeezow my eyes are getting bad. :(
According to the Prosoniq site it's $199 but audioeffects.com sells it for $129:

http://www.audioeffects.com/morph.html

Still not free, but more reasonable.

Victor.
Make sure the demo works for you. I tried it a long time ago and couldn't get it to work at all for me and that was on a basic WIndows XP set up. Maybe they've updated it or I was an isolated issue, but be careful.
Zerocrossing Media

4th Law of Robotics: When turning evil, display a red indicator light. ~[ ●_● ]~

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Blame tweiss2000 for summoning me into this thread :D
Neon Breath wrote:a true morph plugin that would allow a flowing river sound to slowly morph into a barking dog for example.
But that doesn't make much sense to do that though, it's like morphing a picture of someone's face into picture of a guitar, they have no features in common to morph between so it will just look/sound like a blend/crossfade with some deformations going on in between (granted there are different ways to blend sounds if we're talking about morphing, some that might be more interesting than just mixing audio sources), but nothing very coherent. You can morph between things that have something in common like harmonics, but that kind of morphing is just going to sound like some sort of crossfade with pitch-shifting (like in the Kyma video) and some granular thingie if you want to make the sound "freeze" while the transition is going on. You could always morph something with more features than just one set of harmonics though, and by separating those features and morphing them separately have something perhaps interesting.
cron wrote:I think morphing is more a skill than an effect. Obviously the tools play a part, but in the sound examples posted, you can hear that the humans in the recording are somewhat mimicking the sounds to be morphed. For instance, the harpist matches the rhythm of the dog barking. I don't think you could ever make a one-slider process that works in real-time with whatever you throw at it. The system needs some knowledge of what's ahead if it's going to produce a convincing morph trajectory.

The video is quite impressive. Sounds like some kind of pitch-aware granular process from the sounds of it. The morphs often sound like a sliding pitched buzz during the transitions as the granular stream moves from one pitch to the other.

I own CDP and the morph function in that doesn't seem to be pitch aware, so a lot of pre-processing is required to get a convincing result. I listen to Vox 5 by Trevor Wishart which contains some outstanding morphs, all created with an early version of CDP's phase vocoder algorithm in 1986, and it instantly reinforces my view that morphing is a compositional process. The only really great result I've had was morphing the last note of a vocal phrase into a gong in CDP. It wasn't very musically interesting sadly.

All the Kyma buzz I've seen over the last decade seems to be over this morphing effect. It sounds a bit cheesy to me. The clean morph from source to source is a novelty effect you can only really use once or twice before it gets old, and I'm not sure what you'd do with it musically. I'm sure it could be creatively abused, but then I've plenty of methods of spitting broken FFT grids already. Loads of unsubtle, sledgehammer narrative possibilities for people doing sound for film/TV though...
Amen to all of that! You can either dumbly transition between two harmonics using pitch-shifting and blending of the two sounds, or you have to design sounds so that they have more in common, just like you wouldn't morph between two pictures of faces if the faces are at different angles and one is grinning while the other one has their mouth and eyes closed.

Personally I think it's more interesting to morph two sounds into a third new sound than to morph from sound A to sound B over time, the problem with creating a third sound is you need to have sounds that have a lot in common, like two people speaking the same sentence. You could do that using two spectrograms of those two similar sounds and any morphing program like Morpheus (though in the case of voice it might be tricky to get frequencies to align plus if you want to morph noises (siblants, fricatives, plosives, breath etc..) you would have to separate them first and morph them separately) then output the image that is halfway between the two original images then resynthesise that new image in a program like... mmmh let's see, why Photosounder is the only one I can think of right now! :D. But you would lose quality from the resynthesis process anyway. In the case of voice morphing you could probably improve on that using vocoding (modulating an harmonic tone that matches to the frequency of the morphed tone over time with the morphed formants, all of that separated from the noise components of course).

By the way the part about harmonics is important because in an image it's okay if things get deformed a bit, in a sound you have to keep the harmonic ratios intact otherwise it will sound detuned, so in other words you can only morph harmonics using pitch-shifting and a sort of cross-fading. With this in mind I think it could be actually more interesting and simple to morph sounds that are entirely made of noise.

My conclusion is it would require pretty specialised tools and a very good idea of what you're doing to do good sound morphing. I for one wouldn't want to make such a tool.
Last edited by A_SN on Mon Feb 25, 2013 5:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Developer of Photosounder (a spectral editor/synth), SplineEQ and Spiral

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@A_SN: Thanks for your input. Very interesting and informative stuff, coming from a developer like you :)

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Ah_Dziz wrote:i've just been playing around with the morphing in alchemy again and I think it can do a pretty damn decent job of morphing between relatively complex sounds. Basically if the resynthesis sounds natural the morph will also. anybody want to send me two files for a demonstration?
baby crying/heavy machinery
telephone ring/lion roar

try free sound :)

also, im not interested so much in realism, not sure its applicable here anyway, im just very interested in what will happen using such incompatible sounds and what the half way point might sound like?
alchemy is already in my wishlist, but id still like to hear the results if you could :)

doesnt have to be those specific sounds, just a couple of examples of incompatible sounds being morphed would be cool 8)

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vurt wrote:
doesnt have to be those specific sounds, just a couple of examples of incompatible sounds being morphed would be cool 8)
Are these sounds incompatible enough for you?
-An inflating balloon into falling nails
-A motor turning on into a singing wine glass

If you think so, hear them morphed in Alchemy here: http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... sc&start=0 (right-click and 'open in new tab' to get to the Dropbox page and then be able to download sounds)

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ooh the motor/wineglass is niiiice!
some other nice ones too. ill just have to save faster!!

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I'm of the opposite persuasion to Vurt in this case. I'd be interested in hearing some naturally compatible morphs in a playable context. Something cheesily obvious like an EP that morphs into drifty enharmonic bells as velocity increases or a dubstep scream bass that morphs into a human scream (sorry too tired to think of anything more imaginitive).

The consensus here seems to be that gestural morphs will always require a lot of user input to achieve usable results and if I can achieve interesting results using standard tools+effort then I'm personally not that bothered if a morphing tool doesn't exist. It would amount to another interesting transition-useful but not essential.

On the other hand, a playable morph is something I've wanted since I discovered sampling some twenty years ago and thought I'd surely be able to do a decade ago with Cameleon until I found out I couldn't even get a convincing resynthesis of one sound. I would love to hear the results the talented people in this thread can come up with in this direction and would be just as interested to hear about your experiences in making it happen.

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check some of neon breath's morphs at the link above, its not all as i asked for.

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