[sdiy] Synergy FM [was: Re: DX7 hacking?]

[Scott Nordlund]

> …or you can get the worst of both worlds if you get the abstractions of the "macroscopic" editing tools wrong. The Technos Acxel basically did this, and in many ways it turns the synth into too much of a curiosity.
>
> One day I'll get around to scanning the manuals…
>


Ooh, I'd like to see those. From what I understand, the Acxel should be (at least on paper) the most powerful hardware additive/FM synth developed. It seems to promise independent amplitude and pitch envelopes, and arbitrary waveforms per oscillator, with up to 1024 oscillators. I don't know what they're using to resynthesize samples, but I get the impression it isn't very good. Stanford's PARSHL software seems like a theoretically solid way to do it, but I haven't heard the results... 

 
One idea I've been playing with for high level additive synthesis is an
algorithmic approach: say you just want the sound to just generally
"evolve" within a certain range of territory, you can create a random
spectrum with some arbitrary density, then "filter" it with some other
arbitrary function that's scaled in some arbitrary way, and use random processes to control everything. Then fudge it a
little bit by, say, making sure there's always a fundamental, and
normalizing the total power for each "window".