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Chromaphone 2 Review
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Chromaphone 2 Torrent

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Chromaphone is regarded by many as AAS’s jewel in the crown. Now with version two, there are even more facets in that jewel to dazzle us.

by David Baer, May 2016

This is a review of the Chromaphone 2 instrument from Applied Acoustic Systems (or, more commonly, AAS). I will be assuming the reader has no experience with the first version. But before any Chromaphone veterans run off, let me point you to a previous article I wrote about how Chromaphone works its unusual magic in producing sounds in an earlier SoundBytes article. That can be found here:

In it, we explore how sounds are programmed by deconstructing several of the factory presets. Although it was written using the earlier Chromaphone version, it’s still 100% relevant.

Here’s one more interesting note for longtime AAS followers. The story goes that one reason for there being a Chromaphone 2 was so that AAS could convert Chromaphone to their new architecture, something they’ve gradually been doing to most of their other existing instruments. “But wait”, you say … “wasn’t Chromaphone (1) the first instrument to be mounted on that new platform?” It turns out that it was, but that “new platform” got some improvements subsequent to the completion of the first Chromaphone. It being the first software to be taken in the new direction, things were learned along the way. The new architecture got improved to the point that AAS wanted to make Chromaphone fully compliant with the most advanced version. Now, back to basics …

Getting Started

Chromaphone 2 (hereafter we’ll drop the “2”) creates sound through mathematical modelling, meaning a lot a hairy calculations are undertaken to produce the data that comprise the output audio waveforms. Synthesis via modelling is that for which AAS is renowned. In this case, what is modelled is some configuration of objects that include one or two resonators, a mallet to excite one or both and a noise source to likewise excite one or both.

OK, that’s a bit abstract. Think of one such configuration: a drum stick (that’s a kind of mallet) hits a stretched circular membrane and creates a “whack” sound. Even with such a simple scenario, there are a lot of things that can cause the result to sound a certain way. How hard is the head of the drum stick – is it a small wood head or a fabric-tipped softer type of drum stick? How tightly stretched is the membrane?

But the membrane is probably not floating free in space, but rather is stretched over a circular drum body. Now we have two resonators. In this case the membrane responds to the mallet and the drum body responds to the excited membrane. The energy may flow two ways: first from the membrane into the body, exciting the body, and then flowing back from the excited body to further influence the resonance of the membrane.

Now you’re hopefully starting to see what Chromaphone is all about (and don’t worry, we’ll get back to the noise exciter component before this is all over). But it’s not just about creating un-tuned percussive sounds. As you’ll see, Chromaphone can create all manner of tuned musical sounds that both mimic real-life instruments and create sounds from imaginary ones. The breadth of types of sounds is really quite remarkable, as is ably proven by the factory presets.

Sound Production Components

At the top of this article, we see one of Chromaphone’s three UI views, the Play View. Immediately above, we see the Edit View, in which most of the serious work of sound design is done.

Let’s talk about the resonators first. We have the following types (this mostly verbatim from the user manual):

String: a perfectly elastic string,
Beam: a rectangular beam with constant cross-section,
Marimba: a beam with variable section allowing one to obtain partials having a quasi-harmonic ratio,
Plate: a rectangular plate,
Drumhead: circular membrane (this one is new to Chromaphone 2),
Membrane: rectangular membrane,
Open Tube: a cylindrical tube with both ends open allowing one to obtain the complete harmonic series (even and odd harmonics),
Closed Tube: a cylindrical tube with one end closed allowing one to obtain only odd harmonics,
Manual: In this mode, one can create a custom resonator by selecting up to four partials; the rank of each partial is fixed using the Partial 1 to Partial 4

A preset can use just one of these resonators or two. When using two, they can be fully independent, fully coupled (the first resonator being the exciter of the second), or something in between.

Depending upon which resonator type is selected, certain parameters can be set that include things like Material, the setting for which influences how fast partials decay in relation to one another. This is at the heart of Chromaphone sound designing and I’m certainly not going to attempt to explain it all. I’ll leave that to the excellent user manual, which is of the high quality we’ve come to expect from AAS in documentation. I’ll also suggest once again that the truly curious may wish to check the aforementioned SoundBytes tutorial to learn more on this topic.

The resonator coupling is controlled by a Balance control and the Coupled switch. When Coupled is not enabled, the two resonators (assuming both are active) just do their thing and the Balance dictates their relative loudness. When Coupled is on, Balance dictates how easy it is for one resonator to set the other in motion.

Chromaphone 2 Torrent

If you are finding all of this this a bit baffling (if not downright intimidating), you are certainly not alone. Little of this is intuitive stuff. But a little time spent examining the presets will reward you with a lot of insight. Some experimentation will take you even further. That said, the one thing I would really like to see added to Chromaphone is a Random button to instantly throw serendipitous variations together. I truly believe this would be a fascinating way to create some fabulous sounds by building combinations that one would never think of trying.

Exciters

As stated earlier, there are two mechanisms that introduce energy into the resonators: the mallet and the noise generator. They can be used singly or concurrently. Some portion of either can be routed directly to the output mix. The mixer controls can be seen to the right. The two controls labelled Direct govern the output level that goes directly to the output mix.

The mallet parameters are simple: Stiffness, Noise and Color. Stiffness is self-explanatory. Noise is not to be confused with the Noise exciter; it is just a noise component of the mallet strike. Color influences the frequency content of the mallet noise.

This is a good time to mention modulation. In the image to the right, the preset has the Stiffness lightly modulated by key position and semi-lightly modulated by velocity. Modulation is set by clicking and dragging on the little colored dot. Rings of corresponding color appear around the control. This scheme is consistent throughout Chromaphone; it’s simple, elegant and effective.

The Noise exciter is simple on the surface but actually a bit deeper than the Mallet exciter. With it, we can have a sustained exciter influence that can be modulated by an envelope and/or an LFO. There’s a filter which can be one of a variety of pass types. In the image to the right, an LP filter has been selected. The Frequency control does what you’d expect and the middle control dictates the Q of the resonance. For other filter types this control will vary. For example, for an HP/LP pair, the middle control will be width (i.e., the distance between HP and LP cutoff frequencies).

Densit