additive

[Andrew Schrock]

On Thu, 13 Aug 1998, Gur Milstein wrote:
> hi guy's.

Hi Gur! 

> theoretcly any acostic sound can be made in a modular
> ether by addtive or FM but this is hard to be made.
> so my qustion is can i play a acostic instrument like a
> pino or violin or other in to a mic and then in to a scope
> and see its waveshape and envelope and then calculaite
> this data and creat the same sound on a modular ?
> all so is ther any scope or other unit that can take a waveshape
> and do the calculate and give a data of how many sine osc in
> what freq, amplitude and phase do i need to creat the
> same waveshape.
> or even a unit that is cv conected to sin vco's and automaticly
> creat the waveshape.

Well, the main problem with doing additive synthesis on a modular in my
eyes is that to get a decent number of harmonics, you would need at bare
minimum a VCO and VCA _per_ harmonic. This means 64 or 128 sinewave VCO's
and VCA's... eek! A lot of trouble. 

Basically a modular is made to do subtractive synthesis. I'm sure you
_could_ do other stuff, but it would be difficult. Remember that VCO's
already output waves with lots of signature harmonics (squarewave for
example).. it's more typical to take those waves which are already
"constructed" if you will and use those. You could do some very basic
additive synthesis on a large-ish modular, much as you can do very basic
FM synthesis on a large-ish modular, but it's kinda difficult IMO. 

I will keep praises of my newly aquired k5000 off this list due to obvious
off-topic-ness, but it's simply amazing. Some of the sharpest sounds and
lushest pads I've ever heard, and it's all additive... 128 harmonics per
"voice", up to 6 "voices" per "patch".. a VCA per harmonic, formant
filter, PCM samples for non-harmonic stuff like noise.. it's all here... I
haven't delved too deeply into it yet, but I salivate in anticipation at
having enough time to. 

As another somewhat relavent answer to your question, apparently the k5000
is supposed to be able to load in a .wav directly via sounddiver, but it
doesn't work too well. Or so I hear. 

Andrew

| Andrew Schrock							|
| Network Programmer, Synthesizer and electronic music enthusiast	|
| aschrock at cs.brandeis.edu						|