Orrery Demo
2It is a 3D music software based on a mechanical model of the solar system.
Each of the planets can be assigned a sound and looped while spinning around the sun in 3D space. By default, the sounds are recordings of the actual planets from NASA, however they can be replaced with any of your own sounds.
First we need to set up the initial rotation and speed of each planet. To do this, click on one of the planets and choose a ‘Start Angle’ between 0 and 360.
When we click the ‘activate’ button you can see that the planet starts spinning on its axis.
We can then set the ‘speed’ which determines how fast it rotates around the sun. Checking ‘anticlockwise’ rotates it in an anticlockwise direction.
We can also press ‘C’ to view the audio channels and select one of the planets from the audio channel window .
To show the main toolbar press ‘M’. We can now click the main ‘Play’ button or ‘spacebar’ which will start all active planets from its initial rotation and loop sounds from the start of the clip. You can see the timer starts and counts the elapsed time in seconds.
Once all the planet sound sources are set up, we can add filters and effects including low pass filter, high pass filter, reverb, echo delay, distortion and chorus.
We can preview the sounds and rotations individually by clicking the planet's 'play' and ‘stop’ buttons in the audio channel toolbar. If you would like to replace any of the default sounds you can connect a microphone and click the record button.
Using the arrow keys to navigate, we can move between each of the sounds. By default the listener position is set to the main camera, but this can be changed to the sun’s position by pressing ‘L'.
Clicking pause, pauses the sounds and rotations. Clicking ‘stop’ resets the timer, rotation positions and all sounds.
This demo is currently of the first alpha release. The next version will allow exporting to 5.1 and 7.1 speakers as well as recording your track to stereo wav output.