[sdiy] a stupid question

[Steve Begin]

Old tracker programs were popular all through the early 90's and I've heard
some really professional sounding things come from them even though they
deal with pitch simply by playing the sound faster or slower than its normal
speed.  This results in the sample changing in duration and it was something
you just kind of got used to, in some cases you could barely tell.

However, I've dealt with newer programs which can change pitch without
duration or vice versa, and in theory this should be the way to do it, but
in practice it ends up sounding pretty skewed if you try to go more than a
few notes away from the original pitch.

> Steve Begin



-----Original Message-----
From: hexor [mailto:hexor at chi.spunge.org]
Sent: Monday, July 22, 2002 3:03 PM
To: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
Subject: [sdiy] a stupid question


i know it's a stupid question, but i have this little doubt and since i
still haven't studied signal theory and other stuff like that i can't
solve it. a friend of mine is into electronic music so he knows
alot about software synths and music making programs, altough he has
little or no knowledge about maths or electronics. a few days ago he was
explaining me that his favourite program, called reason, stores every
single note for every single instruments. so i said "what a waste of
space, wouldn't it be easier if it stored only a frequency and then
get all the other ones when needed?", but he told me he is sure that it's
impossible, he says that the only way to do this would be to shrink or
enlarge the time of the wave, thus modifyng the sound too, expecially for
big frequency differences. i think it could be done with fourier series,
i mean it could find a reasonable number of harmonics, and then shift
by the same frequency every single harmonic and remix them. would that
work, or i'm missing something? we can't agree
so i ask the question to you, thanks in advance.