In our lecture, we learnt about Pure Data (often referred to as PD) and how to use it. PD is an open-source piece of software that can be used in multiple ways, from recording and generating sound to controlling lighting rigs, and animation. There are different versions of pure data with varying user-friendliness. There are five ‘main flavours’ of PD, vanilla, ceammc, L2Ork, purr data, and plug data. These all do something unique and your personal choice will vary on what you need and how well you know PD. I have only used vanilla as it is the most simple for beginners.
We learnt about how to build oscillators in PD, which showed me just how much you can do with the software. You can build as many oscillators as you want, and with enough research and dedication, you could build a whole synthesiser. Before this lecture, I didn’t know this was possible. We were also taught about how to use objects, which is what you use to build things in PD. We also learnt that the use of tilde (~) is very important to PD, for example, you cannot type the word dac (Digital to analog converter), it will not work if you do not use a tilde behind it, it should look like this: dac~.
While using PD I realised the number of possibilities it has, so when I went home I installed some premade PD patches to experiment with. I installed noise and drone generators and after playing with them, I decided to find out how it was made by looking at the specs of it. I found it hard to understand at first, but this is something I want to learn in the future.