Claves for Flat MUBU and woods for Sharp MUBU.
Picture from: www.manigua.org
For MUBU’s voices were chose percussive elements from the music field.
The idea was to find sounds that could look like the cry of an animal or a kind of knoking by those creatures.
For this reason were chose intruments like claves (which have a flat sound) and woods (which have a sharp sound) for the rythmical MUBU and pieces of xylophone for the two melodic MUBU, higher for one and lower for the other.
So we have two different combination: one is the rythm (claves + woods) and the melody (xylophones) and the second is the sharp (woods + high xylophone) and the flat sounds (claves + low xylophone).
Screen shot of Propellerhead Reason.
Anyhow, for the prototype we used speakers, so the entire sound design was made using the software Reason from Propellerhead.
The two most important things considered during the sound design part were: first guarantee a nice melodic result for every combination of the different sings, and second to avoid synchronizing problems.
To solve the first problem, for the two melodic MUBU were chose notes from the pentathonic scale. The resul of this chiose allow us to have quite intresting melody fo every combination without risks to be out-of-tune.
The second issues was solved with the Pure Data patch.
The patch automatically syncronize the tempo of all the MUBU, so when a MUBU’s voice is added to the others the software enable the relative audio output at the right moment.
This procedure causes a little delay form the moment of the connection to the output of the audio, but it enought little to be imperceptible to huma ear.