For this project, I didn’t really know where to begin, so I went back to the tutorial on the pfft~ object to see if I’d be inspired. Thankfully, I was! They made a patch on that tutorial that dealt with capturing a recording and processing that with some fancy math, so I tweaked it to create recordings with a vocoder-like effect, and used it as my subpatch for the pfft~. For reference, I included a link to the tutorial at the end of the post.

Here is both the subpatch (framerecord) and the main patch (frame-player).

Where the fun really began though, was figuring out what I could do with that recording. Because I used both inlets of my pfft~ separately, I dedicated one to recording and the other to doing different playback effects that would be done in the main patch. The reason I was able to do this is because my fft treated each frame of audio separately and stored them in a buffer~ to be used whenever I desired. So, if I wanted to just listen to one frame for a while, I could stop the recording on that frame and hear that particular frame for as long as I wanted. I added this capability into the playback effects used in the main patch.

As for the other playback effects, which were all facilitated through a counter, I added the ability to speed up playback, slow it down, play forwards, play in reverse, and play the whole recording forwards then all backwards. Lastly, for convenience, I added the ability to change the maximum value of the counter so short recordings could loop back through without having a long gap of silence while waiting out the space in the buffer~ from the subpatch that wasn’t used in the recording.

I did a demo of all of these effects, which can be found here:

And of course, here is the code for my main patch:

And my subpatch:

Pfft~ tutorial: https://docs.cycling74.com/max7/tutorials/14_analysischapter04