Mammut: sound design software for unpredictable fast Fourier transforms
Mammut is a sound design tool that wants to manipulate your audio in a complex and interesting way. It’s unpredictable, intense and full of surprises which is what every sound designer needs.
Mammut
This is all about frequency and fast Fourier transforms (FFT). Once you’ve let go of your control over the time axis Mammut will start to pull out surprising and exciting forms of sound. There are all sorts of things going on like non-linear stretching, spectrum shifting, convolution, filtering, your audio being broken into sound particles that are then folded and manipulated. It is as complex as it sounds.
It comes from a project developed by Øyvind Hammer (the GUI is by Kjetil Matheussen) for Notam, the “Electronic Art Research Center” in Oslo. They talk about “mammoth FFT” which points to the huge amount of analysis that’s going on, typically millions of processes as opposed to the thousands usually found in regular FFT.
As your audio is split by FFT into its spectrum each small peak across the range is processed differently by all or some of the included functions. It’s not really about predicting an outcome, it’s about trusting the software to develop the sound in the direction that you push it.
It’s a shame that there are no official sound samples and videos of the software. But it’s freeware and that means you can download and test it for yourself! Peter Kirn of cdm , who made us aware of the tool, created a sample song with the software found on their SoundCloud page (see below).
Price and specifications
Notam02 Mammut is available as a free download on the developer’s website. The software runs on Mac OSX, Windows and Linux. The compiler Juce makes it possible to keep the old code of the software compatible with new operating systems. Unfortunately, there is no manual or explanation of the software, so you have to find your way through the many complicated parameters.
More info
Sounds
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