[sdiy] Additive Synthesis Envelope Generation Thoughts

[Chris Strellis]

Hi Eric,

I'm not sure I completely follow you train of thought but it does seem remarkably similar to how my Emax SE and Emax II perform additive synthesis.  You can specify the levels of say 24 partials in time step 1 and then the levels at time step 24 say and then get the Emax to interpolate and calculate the result.  Some interesting evolving textures can be made this way.

You can download the SE manual here: http://www.emulatorarchive.com/assets/PDF/Emax%20SE%20Upgrade.pdf which explains it in more depth!

Cheers

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Robotboy8 at aol.com [mailto:Robotboy8 at aol.com]
Sent: 30 June 2005 03:49
To: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
Subject: [sdiy] Additive Synthesis Envelope Generation Thoughts


One of the primary complaints it seems that people often have about additive synthesis is that it's too hard to control and that nobody wants to spend hours drawing envelope shapes for however many groups of partials they might have.  So I was thinking, what if they only had to generate one envelope?  What if there were just a bunch of points on a line, and at each one you adjust the levels of each partial or group of partials, and it interpolates between the values of each group at each point?  And maybe also it could be possible to skip putting in a level for a given group at a given point so that it would interpolate between the points before and after it while skipping that one?

Not much to do with modular synthesis, but I think that sometime soon I might try to get together some people with more programming experience than myself and write a bootable-floppy additive synth.  (Yeah, like that'll happen.  I get the fun job of designing how it works and looks and sounds and then i try to get someone to do the far less fun job of making the damn thing actually work.  Alas... back to PureData for me...)

    -eric