I tried my hand at making a tone-cluster patch in Pd similar to Akihiko Matsumoto’s http://www.youtube.com/user/akihikotube#p/u/23/g5d0kodosl8. I think my initial problem is that I would like to access all frequencies, not just those in the chromatic scale. Also, it seems to me that I would need one oscillator per note, which is ridiculous if you want to make something that isn’t too CPU intensive. Looking at it again it seems that he could could be using a random number generator to send values to [mtof] (that’s the midi to frequency object that Max/Msp and Pd share) and using a single oscillator and reverb to hold the notes, thus getting the cluster effect. If anyone has any ideas please let me know, I’ll keep trying an post my results.

P.S. I also tried contacting Akihiko to ask him about the patch but no response.

UPDATE

I got responses about the Tone-Cluster Patch on the Pd mailing list.

Hans C. Steiner recommended the ‘many‘ lib, which is a library for managing multiple instances (manifestations) of an object. So, for a tone-cluster synth patch which uses every frequency from 1 – 15khz, something like this is extremely handy. And it includes a sample patch that plays 200 samples at once, but I’m still having trouble installing it as a user lib. When playing the 200 voicetest patch, Pd produces an error stating that some of the objects don’t exist.

Martin Brinkmann sent me this (Clustersynth) patch which sounds surprisingly like Akihiko’s. Another great thing about Pd, patches a freely distributed.

I’ll be checking both these possibilities, thanks.