Hello, recently I was rtequired to work at home, and I have an 8 output channel sound card, so I figured... why not work in the middle of the jungle, or the beach, instead of in my room?
do you get the idea?
I want to position 8 speakers and make a surround mix of a sound ambient, for example birds coming from one speaker, the river flowing from another, etc... I think the best way to go is with recorded nature samples (but maybe one day I want to be in mars, who knows, so maybe synthetic sounds might be an added feature...), and some randomness (volume, occurrence, different river intensityies, etc.) would be great, since hearing the same sounds over and over is... let's say boring.
Is this too difficult to do? I'm a newbie at programming, the further I went is CSS... but I'm willing to give it a try.

1st request: criticism? ideas?
2nd request: Can anybody point me in a good direction to start making this?
3rd request: Resources?

THANKS!!!

PS: it can get even more ambitious and cooler, making sounds "move" trough the speakers, like a bird sounds form my right and later it sounds from my left, or the river is multichannel so it's more inmersing, and stuff in the likes of that. And even more cool: give it "moods", like the wind starts tio blow harder, and birds start to make more noises, stuff like that occurs to me.

PSS: IS THERE ALREADY SOMEONE WORKING ON THIS OR AN ALREADY EXISTING PATCH?

PSSS: I noticed a strong tendence towards art and experimentation in the patches I saw here. Nature is also art, but the intention here is not to play, entertain, amaze... its more like having a plant in tyour living room, it does nothing, yet it makes you more comfy.

Greets,
Mario, from Argentina (that's why my enlish is so bad-confusing :P)

Hi Mario,

I don't know if you seen this project http://radio.rumblesan.com/

It's an internet radio using pd, you can try downloading some patches and adapt them to your technical environnement (add a [dac~ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8] for your main output and then dispatch sound through those outputs). It will help you to understand some generative processes, and get used to pd.

Then you'll have to build a 8 channel mixer, let's say one channel per speaker, and control their volume automatically (or randomely)

After that you can do a lot of stuff : for instance play field recordings from time to time, and then work on synthetic sounds. For instance you could have a folder in which you have all your patches, every 5 min pd will choose randomely a patch in it open it an assign it radomely to a input in your mixer patch ... when you've achieved that your good to go !

This site is a golgmine of synthetic sounds with pd : http://obiwannabe.co.uk/ (rivers, wind, storm, birds etc...)

good luck and have fun

The thing is... I´m not a programmer, I can´t even start to think in programming, and I can't find a "Where to start" link... maybe that's all i need.

PS: i want to make it from scratch, so I can really contribute.

First thing, try downloading the patches from patchwerk radio and assemble some of them in a new patch of yours. just copy/paste the whole stuff. be carefull, some patches may contain abstraction so you need to copy the pd files in the directory in which your main patch is.

This patch will need to have a [dac~ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8] for each channel of your soundcard, as output (don't forget enable your soundcard under the menu Media->Audio Settings). So you just need to link the audio output of a patch to one input of the dac~ object. This way you can have a small generative sound scene with not much effort.

After that we'll be able to talk some more on how to radomize sources on speakers etc...

I dont mean to be rude, but if i want to learn to read, i want to learn the letters first. Do you get what I mean?
Maybe I´m not into the programers' code of communication, in fact, an open scource'sw software wiki is still ioncromprehensible to me after some years. I need to know something like an "introduction" and an "index" (talking as if we were to read a manual), in a didactive sense, not a pragmatic sense.
No offense, I just am not into the programmers's groove, but maybe you can point me to these things.
Thanks!
Peace!

Of course you want some theory first follow the links :

http://www.pd-tutorial.com/english/index.html

http://en.flossmanuals.net/pure-data/

Thanks a bunch!

@BerengerRecoules said:

Of course you want some theory first follow the links :

http://www.pd-tutorial.com/english/index.html

http://en.flossmanuals.net/pure-data/

excuse me is there a pdf or a way to print this to make it more readable?

THANKS!
PEACE!

This actually is a html version of a paperback book :
http://www.pd-tutorial.com/

Thanks you're very helpful and very kind. I already downloaded the foss PDF and a couple other books. I'll print them and swallow them +

hey that's the same book I found! great!