Suzanne Ciani's 1976 Buchla cookbook, now with VCV Rack patches — Sunday Loop #017
Why Sunday Loop exists
The week moves fast. Between work, sessions, and everything else, the good reads get lost in the noise.
Every Sunday evening I share a few links — things I found worth reading during the week. Logic Pro, sound design, sampling, the occasional curveball. No algorithms, no filler. Just a few things I’d genuinely recommend to a friend.
Grab a coffee. It won’t take long.
— Ewald
This Week
Category: Sound Design
Suzanne Ciani wrote this report for the National Endowment for the Arts in 1976 to meet a grant requirement, and it became the working manual for the Buchla Series 200. Issue #8 of the Orpheus Instituut’s ECHO journal publishes it as a digital edition by Pierre Collard, Juan Parra Cancino and Ciani herself, with audio examples and signal-path diagrams next to the original text and a VCV Rack recreation of every patch. The techniques range from “Melodic-Rhythmic Reliefs” on the Model 248 MARF, of which fewer than 10 units were built, to a string patch that gets its bowing from the Model 285 frequency shifter. When Ciani returned to live performance in the 2010s, she used the same paper to relearn her own techniques.
2. blepfx Spectra Moves a Spectrum From One Track to Another
Category: Sound Design
Spectra splits two signals into a spectral envelope and a harmonic residual and lets you recombine them, so the formant shape of one track can sit on the harmonics of another. You pick one of four envelope algorithms: linear-phase FFT, Hilbert with less pre-ringing, LPC with a vowel-like character, or a zero-latency IIR vocoder bank. The FFT modes add up to about 85 ms of latency at 48 kHz, and formant shift covers −24 to +24 semitones. VST3, AU and CLAP for macOS 10.13+, Windows and Linux, from $25 with a free limited demo. Dubspot says openly that it has “not used it in a session”.
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