IRCAM has announced a set of audio plug-ins called ASAP that allow for transforming sound in creative ways. Thanks to ARA2 implementation, the spectral transformations can be easily integrated into your editing workflow.
ASAP contains the following plugins:
- Spectral Remix [Free]: The plug-in allows you to control the balance of the harmonic, noise, and attack components of the sound. Beyond many experimental uses, the plug-in can be used to highlight or hide certain audio elements and characteristics such as background noise, vocals, percussive sounds, and so on.
- Spectral Crossing [Premium]: The plug-in allows you to cross the amplitudes and the frequencies of a source sound and of a side-chain sound to generate a hybrid sound. The plug-in can be used to creatively interpolate and transform one sound into another by gradually mixing the phase and amplitude components of the two audio signals.
- Spectral Morphing [Premium]: The plug-in allows you to apply the spectral characteristics of a side-chain sound to a source sound in order to transform its timbre. By using a voice sound as the side-chain on an instrument sound as the source, spectral morphing can be used to make the instrument speak.
- Spectral Clipping [Free]: The plug-in allows you to expand and compress the energy of spectral components within a range of thresholds. It can be used to silent low-level sounds such as background noise or to limit high-energy peaks such as high-pitched bird calls.
- Formant Shaping [Premium]: The plug-in allows you to modify the vowels and play with the formant resonances of the sound. It can be used to change the spoken vowels of a voice or to vocalize instruments such as a drum set.
- Spectral Surface [Premium]: The plug-in allows you to draw shape filters on the sound spectrogram and to control their gain and the fades. The sound representation and the effect interface, made possible thanks to the ARA 2 plug-in extension, allow the creation of very complex and precise surface filters to reduce or increase specific parts of the spectral components of the sound. The plug-in can be used to compensate for annoying artifacts in the sound as well as to transform the sound creatively.
The plug-in set supports multichannel processing at any common sample rate. The interface offers graphical themes to adapt to the graphical appearance of your digital audio workstations and your operating system.
The Spectral Remix and the Spectral Clipping plug-ins are part of the Ircam Forum free membership. The other ASAP plug-ins are part of the Ircam Forum Premium technologies bundle offering many tools, plug-ins, and applications to analyze, synthesize, and transform sound. A premium subscription of €200/yr is required, however demo versions of the ASAP premium plug-ins are available to free users.
