Scatterer "Spawn Interval" is affected by pitch

Hi,

I posted this in a thread about pitch shifting, but it may have been missed and probably more appropriate as its own thread.

For a scatterer, if I pitch up/down the scatterer (via its pitch knob, via the master pitch, or via the master pitch of an event its nested in), it also adjusts the “spawn interval” of that scatterer. So if I have a scatterer spawning sounds every 300ms, and I increase the pitch of the scatterer, the sounds now spawn even faster than every 300ms. Is this intended?

It looks like my only option, if I need the spawn interval to remain at 300ms, is to change pitch of each sample (within the scatterer playlist), which can be tedious if I’m just experimenting or fine tuning an event and the playlist contains a lot of samples. I’m also not sure under what circumstances the current behaviour would be preferred, but I just might not have encountered that yet (maybe for music).

I also have no idea how to automate the pitch of a scatterer without also experiencing this “Spawn Interval” modulation. I.e. I’m porting over a project from Designer to Studio, and what I’m trying to do is have the pitch of spawned sounds increase as a parameter increases, while keeping the spawn interval unchanged.

Thanks,
Sean

Yes, this behavior is intended. It’s often useful for the spawn frequency of a a scatterer instrument to be proportional to the length of the sounds spawned by that scatterer instrument, and the current behavior supports that use-case. For example, if your game featured a scatterer that played snatches of eerie music in random order with spatial but not temporal randomization, it’d be important for those snatches of music to be on-beat and synchronized with each other no matter what pitch the music was playing at.

If you want to adjust the pitch of a scatterer instrument’s spawned sounds independently of the spawn frequency of that scatterer instrument, there’s an easy way to do that: Add a multi-instrument to the scatterer instrument playlist, then drag everything else in the scatterer instrument into that multi instrument’s playlist. Adjusting (or automating) the pitch of the multi-instrument will then adjust the pitch of every sound spawned by the scatterer without affecting the scatterer’s spawn interval, and without requiring you to adjust the pitch of every single instrument that the scatterer can spawn.

Thanks for that, Joseph. I will certainly keep that functionality in mind for future projects, and the multi-instrument solution that you described worked nicely. I had only tried adding the scatterer via a nested event, but the pitch related logic propagated to the nested scatterer as well.

Thanks again,
Sean