The New Pulsar Generator Manual
<p style="line-height: 1.66667rem;"><span class="font_yp1dzp093">The New Pulsar Generator Manual is a sound installation for 3.1 speaker system, synthetic voice and computer-generated sounds. The material point of departure for the work is the user manual of the New Pulsar Generator (nuPG) program, developed in the audio programming language SuperCollider 3. The nuPG program encapsulates and extends a sound model of a pulsar synthesis, a technique originally invented by Curtis Roads and popularised in his book ‘Microsound (2001)’. As an audio technique, the origins of pulsar synthesis can be traced to historical analog techniques built around a principle of filtered pulses. The vocal-like, ‘glottal’ characteristics of its timbre can be linked with early experiments in speech synthesis at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne by Werner Meyer-Eppler, Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer. The sound work of The New Pulsar Generator Manual attempts to mobilize these complex attributes of the pulsar as a synthetic object and present the computer program as a cultural artefact.</span></p>
Authors: Marcin Pietruszewski
Contributors: Eric Laska, Geoff Mullen