additive

[Eli Brandt]

Jim Johnson wrote:
> Yeah, that's what they said when I was in engineering school 20 years ago,
> too. This is the kind of oversimplification that is rampant in engineering
> texts - as exemplified by the statement "any sound can be broken into its
> harmonic series"... As has been discussed on the list, not all sounds
> consist only of integer harmonics.

Even an aperiodic signal can in principle be converted to and from a
basis of sinusoids: you use the actual Fourier transform, not the
discretized thing that engineers call by that name. :-)

> Furthermore, no musical instrument
> produces a single sound - there is an incredible range of variability in
> the sound produced by any single instrument.

Very true.  Additive synthesis may seem like the Holy Grail, but
really it's a lot like the "huh huh huh just draw the waveform, coool"
method.  Not a synthesis model with nice knobs on it; unless you're
into organs you need an analysis to drive your synthesis and it ends
up like sampling, except with some nice stretch/shift ability.

-- 
     Eli Brandt  |  eli+ at cs.cmu.edu  |  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/