Timing CHOP

In recent versions of TouchDesigner, the Timing CHOP has been renamed to the Beat CHOP.

Summary

The Timing CHOP generates a variety of ramps, pulses and counters that are timed to the beats per minute and the sync produced by the Beat Dialog or the beat Command.

• You can generate a ramp every 1/4 1/2 1 2 4 8 32 beats.
• You can generate ramps of any other length, like 12 beats per bar (ramp) and fractional beats like 3.33 beats per ramp.
• You can generate a set of channels, where each channel is delayed relative to the prior channel. This is useful, for example, for moving eight objects delayed by one beat each.
• There also is a counter of how many ramps it has generated.
• The Count+Ramp type generates a continuously-rising ramp equal to the number of cycles since the start.
• There are three ways to re-start the counting of ramps: Press the "Tap" button on a Beat gadget, send a pulse into the Timing CHOP's input, or press the Timing CHOP's Reset button.
• The 'Zero While Reset' flag holds the ramps at zero while the reset is on, then it starts climbing again.

The Beat Dialog is used to manually tap the beat of a piece of music, and automatically continues the beats. The Timing CHOP converts these beats into a repeating ramps or pulse that continues to keep time with the music after the taps stop.

The Timing CHOP's sample rates are the same as the overall animation's frame rate (60 samples per second as reported by the "fps" command). For short, fast ramps, you may want to increase the Timing CHOP's sample rate to 120 or 240.

Parameters - Timing Page

Output BPM - Outputs the session's bpm (beats per minute) and disables the rest of the Timing CHOP's parameters.

Period - Number of beats it takes to generate one cycle of ramp.

Shape - Ramp, Pulse, Sine, Count, Count+Ramp. The Count+Ramp is a continuously-rising ramp.

Multiples - The number of channels to create.

Shift Offset - Delays all channels by this amount. 0 = no change, .5 means 50% of one period later.

Shift Step - When set to 1, and Multiples is 5, each ramp channel is 1/5 cycle later than the previous channel. When set to .1, the delay is 1/50 cycle. This is a way to stagger the channels.

Random Offset - The amount that each ramp is randomly time-shifted relative to a perfect ramp.

Random Seed - Changing this generates a different set of random offsets.

Reset - This button restarts the ramps from zero. The ramp is also zero when the Timing CHOP's input is above 0.

Reset Condition - This menu determines how the Reset input triggers a reset of the channel(s).

• Off to On - channels are reset when the Reset input goes off to on.
• While On - channels are reset when the Reset input goes on. The channel will hold the reset value until the input turns off.
• On to Off - channels are reset when the Reset input goes on to off.
• While Off - channels are reset when the Reset input goes off. The channel will hold the reset value until the input turns on.

Parameters - Channel Page

Sample Rate /rate - The sample rate of the output channels.

Extend Left, Extend Right /left /right- The left and right extend conditions (before/after range).

Default Value /defval - The default value for extend conditions.

Inputs

Input - sending a non-zero pulse will reset the timing ramp to 0. This acts the same as the manual Reset button on the Timing Page (See above). This allows you to change the phase of the timing ramps coming from the Timing CHOP.

Standard Options and Local Variables

None.