Much as I love my special custom made timbre-picker, I'm taking it out to use the more standard UIPicker instead so that there can be more room on the screen and you can pick more accurately . This is because I've been adding lots of timbres and it was getting cumbersome! Amongst these timbres is one that is built out of the spectrum of a harmonium reed, and "voices".





SrutiBox will come with some read-only presets as custom Scale intervals:

in the SrutiBox preset:

Sruti from V 1.0.1 this is custom so you can modify some of the intervals to replace, say, the kind of useless "Ma" (729/512) with a more useful octave higer "sa" (2/1).

Harm from v1.0.1 this is now based on the true 1/1 and not two octaves higher. You can use lower pitched base frequencies to build a richer timbre directly out of harmonics.

in the Just Just preset:

Harm (as before)

r+5..., Five octaves of roots and perfect just fifths.

5ths, a chain of fifths from 128/81 to 2187/2048.

M3,m3, a pattern of major and minor thirds piled up on each other - sequential tones build up into familiar extended chords like Major 7/9/11 or minor 7/9

The "pumping the volume" algorithm got tweaked so that the higher number reeds fade out faster than the lower numbered reeds. This lets you hear the effect of pumping more (or not, in case you set the minimum volume up to 100%).

Features keep creeping in as I change my inner philosophies about SrutiBox.

- saved settings are more important now. There will be a number of read-only settings shipping with them so more Interval Sets can be used.
These "presets " are read-only, but can be renamed to a read-write copy. The current settings are automatically saved in a special set called "Last Settings" when you exit.
Read only sets are marked in a gray color in the list and cannot be deleted.

- the random feature has changed: now it has a separate button (a toggle) next to the chorus slider. This makes room for more interval sets.

- There are more customized Interval sets .. in fact I'm thinking of simply having the 12 ET and Just sets as "permanent" and the others (Harmoinic, sruti) as customizable, thus making 4 customizable Interval sets in each setting setup .

- - - - meanwhile, I'm also working on other projects.

Here's the current V1.1 screen:



The (s) takes you to the new save screen. The entire state of the Srutibox except the random tunings is saved.
Maybe I will save them after all - why not?

This example is using a custom interval set. When you name a setting or choose it, it becomes a button at the top of the "play" screen,
which will reload that scale when you press it (like a revert button).

Here's the save screen list, which is pretty boring.

Each time you start the application, it overwrites a saved setting called " Revert to Start Setting", so you can go back to where you started.
I used to name it with the date, but they really piled up and I don't have a rename function yet!

The waving-to-volume function has changed a little to make it more sensitive. And since I came up with the new timbre picker, I'll be coming up with some more timbres, probably sounding more like real reeds.

On the other hand, I've been thinking I may put out a variant of the SrutiBox that is more experimental and yet simpler. More as this develops.

Sruti V1.1 has more timbres in it: three "reed or organ" like timbres (odd harmonics mostly) and some new human vowel formant based timbres. Because there are so many now, the timbre slider is being replaced with a button bar like thing. Apples button bar cannot be customized to match my simple UI scheme, so I made my own .

It's fun to drive the voices with pitches out of their ranges, but since each "reed" gets a custom made wave form, I may merge the vowel sounds for each range into single timbre settings, that is, the vocal "AH" will be bass AH for low frequencies, tenor, alto, soprano, as the pitches go higher.

I may also add in some weirder formant based sounds of my own, now that I'm not restrained in the number of sounds.

A few more features may creep in before release.

SrutiBox 1.1 is coming along nicely - I think there'll just be one more major feature before I let it go : saving your setups under a name.

I feel ambivalent about that, because presets and saved and shared work is such a creativity suppressor. Maybe I'll just make sure no public post lasts more than a week . That way, popular stuff will survive, as long as it gets reposted. I could also be nice on the repository site and expose the patches as XML so you can use them in external computational programs.

You may have noticed the SrutiBox web site is a little easier to understand. I'm working to make the instructions less mysterious. I'll probably add a links page with microtonal, Carnatic and experimental links related to this application.

I see that SrutiBox is starting to get some blog references and referrals. Thanks! If you are using it in compositions, email me (tutti-srutti@jhhl.net), and I'll link back to you somewhere in the SrutiBox site.

There are other apps on the way too, some more and some less useful than SrutiBox.