Hullo there;

High level: I'm working on a scene consisting of a number of bouncy balls. I have a set of recordings of ball bounce sounds, and I would like to use CHOPS to basically instance a random one of these sounds each time a ball bounces.

I have this more or less working, but I would like to scale the amplitude of the selected sound by the velocity of the ball when it bounces. I *think* the way I need to do this is like so:



On the Copy node, I have the following in the Variables pane:



Then, on the "scale_the_sound_based_on_velocity" node, I do this:




However, the results I'm getting aren't what I expect. I think one of the problems is that I want to actually multiply the sound amplitude by the values in "incoming_bounce_data", rather than those by "triggers", which is what I'm assuming $V provides in the Copy node. However, my triggers are all normalized from 0-1, and my results end up going way over 1, so I think I'm misunderstanding 1) what $V actually does, and 2) what the proper way to go about doing this is.

Might there be any CHOPS experts who may be able to assist me? I really love using Houdini for this sort of sound design stuff, it's so very weird and fun, and I'd love to get better at it. .

Hm old File that do exactly That [www.sidefx.com]

Hm! This is super interesting and I'm learning from it. Thank you so much!

It doesn't quite work the way my head imagines this SHOULD work; in this example, the sound clips are composited together, then the entire composite is 'gained' by an envelope. I would have imagined that it would be more accurate to gain each individual sound event, THEN do the composite. But I admit that I'm not exactly sure if these two things would yield identical results.

Ok, yeah, the more I think about this, the more I think what I want to do is:

1) read the value of a particular "bounce intensity"
2) scale one randomly-selected audio clip by this intensity
3) THEN copy it into a larger "master bounce" composition.

To try to word all this another way: the file linked in the thread mentioned above does a global multiply on the final instanced sound clips. This is akin to globally adjusting the lights in the scene, which isn't what I want to do. I want to effectively adjust each "light" separately before adding it into my scene. (thinking about the sound clips as I think about lights is the most helpful analogy I can come up with to describe what I'm trying to do).