Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: MOTM

The discussion of a VC EG is interesting. First, the idea of controlling a
sound's envelope with 'velocity' or other 'burst' of performance energy is
fundamental to creating a musical sound. Second, it has RARELY been done in
the history of modular synthesis. After all, touch/velocity sensitivity was
very rare in synthesis before MIDI.

Let me also note that many psychoacoustic investigators have stated firmly
that the ∗envelope∗ of a sound contributes more to its unique identifyable
characteristic that any other aspect, even though synthesists tend to be
continue to be more concerned with harmonic content that amplitude contour.

The thing is, simply opening up 4 jacks to control the parameters of an ADSR
doesn't do it 'all' for making a sound natural. We almost need some kind of
intervening scaling module.

For instance, if I add more energy to a sound, depending upon the modelled
medium, I would expect that its attack would shorten, it's decay likewise
(unless the decay were substituting for the sustain, as in a piano), and the
release would lengthen.

This is a crude, choppy, post-Friday-night-martini plea, I guess, for an
interpolating module whereby one could input a simple velocity CV and tailor
its effects on the overall sound coming from the modular.

The fact is, psychoacoustic research has shown that playing 'harder' on
acoustic instruments does more for the envelope of the 'filter' than of the
'VCA'. Playing harder on a xylophone ∗seems∗ to make it louder, but in
reality is does more to increase the amount of energy in the higher
frequency areas than changes the actual measured amplitude.

Nighty-nite, all.

Zzzzzzzzzz...