Modern forms of synthesis - is there one?

[whyterabbyt]

moppel quoth
Why is that? I have experienced that myself. I tried new stuff, and most of the time it turned out as noise.

I found out that every time I tried to operate on myself I screwed it up. Surgery cant ever work.

[tee boy]

Is FM the lastest form of synthesis??

Resynthesis as an idea has been round for a few hundred years, a form of granular was possible in the early 1930s using tapes, additive is basically a hammond organ, & just everyone (darling) uses subtractive, the same way everyone uses AM.

Physical modelling? is that actually a form of synthesis in the sense of the above

I think FOF synthesis is pretty modern. Not sure exactly. I suppose you could band this with granular synthsis, but i tend to think of it as a technique in its own right.

I guess thats probably the way to look at this matter. The theory of many synthesis techniques is old, but that doesnt stop the practice from developing and keeping the technique 'cutting edge'.

[whyterabbyt]

Dang, nearly managed to confuse VOSIM with FOF. Sigh. Anyways, VOSIM is late 70's or so, but its not really been implemented outside academia as far as Im aware...

[tee boy]

Man if f**king should be! Iv been using this in Csound and its really cool technique. Id imagine you could make a quality (and economical) pcm synth if you used FOF to modulate short sampled waveforms. It would definately be unique anyway!

[shamann]

Dang, nearly managed to confuse VOSIM with FOF.

There are VOSIM patches for Nord Modular, don't think that falls exclusively under academe.

[whyterabbyt]

Funnily enough shamman, I came across that while trying to check my dates on VOSIM.... still rare tho'

[saulc12]

saulc12 quoth
Everytime I see a message thread with comments by you in it 'whyterabbyt', your comments always seem to be a string of abuse about the other people in the thread and you trying to tell everybody how clever you are.

Im not responsible for how things 'seem' to you, but its interesting that its far from novel for someone who I've told 'no, that's not correct' to start whining about how terrible I am to everybody else.

But I get PM's of thanks all the time for helping people out all the same. Funny that. Can't seem to attach your name to any threads, let alone one's where you're trying in any way to be helpful. Funny that.

Nor did you list that many particularly new methods of synthesis, or make any attempt at engaging with the topic at all, really. Both physical modelling and granular had already been mentioned.

My point was simple, you made some abusive comments about the things people said, but didn't really add anything

Like these?

Scanning synthesis is more recent than most of these.

And its a reiteration of tape-based techniques, as already said earlier....

Or the response you picked up on to JonnyX?

I dont necessarily think that agglomerating different methods counts as a 'new' method, though...

Yeah; how 'abusive' can you get.

and I think, that just as you would like to say that 'if you see something is wrong you will say so', well guess what, so do I.

Ummm, I was talking about bringing in factual information, not your pathetic little ad hominem on account of being corrected. But hey, whatever make you feel superior.

from the dipshit...

You said it.

Okay, first of all I actually answered a question I read on the thread and my answer began with 'as far as I am aware' or words to that effect, so you can bet that, unlike you, I am not claiming to be the fount of all knowledge. As it happens the methods I mentioned may have been mentioned earlier in the thread, but I just missed them as I was only skimming through.

Secondly comparing granular synthesis, which is a computationally expensive digital technique to tape looping and splicing is not really a fair comparison. I would certainly agree that tape looping and splice is the forerunner to digital sampling and that granular synthesis is an offshoot of this, but that doesn't make them the same thing. Current methods used for physical modelling are also dependent on current technology to be viable, even in research institutions so are alsoe fairly new.

Thirdly, any comments made about mathematics changing are totally ridiculous, mathematics itself does not change, it is the application of mathematics that does - and believe me, I can claim to know something about mathematics.

Finally, I have had arguments with you in other threads as have a number of other people, you just conveniently forget, and strangely I don't ever remember seeing anybody thanking you for anything.

[saulc12]

oh and I just took a look at the only reference I could find to scanner synthesis and the document I read described a physical modelling technique which uses a table of modes of vibration taken from a vibrating body or string that has been scanned - so this is a form of physical modelling

[droolmaster0]

Thirdly, any comments made about mathematics changing are totally ridiculous, mathematics itself does not change, it is the application of mathematics that does - and believe me, I can claim to know something about mathematics.

Well, if I were to talk about mathematics changing, I could mean one of 2 things (among others, possibly). One would be that the underlying structure of math itself (whatever that may be) is changing - and that, indeed, is ridiculous.

However, one might also talk about mathematics as changing, say, since the days of ancient Greece, and what one would mean, presumeably, is that the techniques of mathematics have evolved. I think that this is obviously what most people would mean by talking about mathematics changing, and this is not, quite obviously, a ridiculous statement. Note that this is more than just saying that only the application of mathematics changes, which is the only permissable version of this that you seem to accept.

So, it would seem to me that you are obviously full of it, however arrogant you may be about your knowledge of mathematics.

[Sicklecell666]

edit: not worth losing my account over..

piss off, saul

[funkadil]

what about BM synthesis? bitrate modulation? actually i just made that up, that would be a mess.

[saulc12]

Thirdly, any comments made about mathematics changing are totally ridiculous, mathematics itself does not change, it is the application of mathematics that does - and believe me, I can claim to know something about mathematics.

Well, if I were to talk about mathematics changing, I could mean one of 2 things (among others, possibly). One would be that the underlying structure of math itself (whatever that may be) is changing - and that, indeed, is ridiculous.

However, one might also talk about mathematics as changing, say, since the days of ancient Greece, and what one would mean, presumeably, is that the techniques of mathematics have evolved I think that this is obviously what most people would mean by talking about mathematics changing, and this is not, quite obviously, a ridiculous statement. Note that this is more than just saying that only the application of mathematics changes, which is the only permissable version of this that you seem to accept.

So, it would seem to me that you are obviously full of it, however arrogant you may be about your knowledge of mathematics.

Techniques - I assume you mean the way in which maths is used to solve problems - hang on a second, wouldn't solving problems using mathematics be the application of mathematics. I don't need for you to start some kind of senseless debate with me nor do I need to continue in a senseless debate with whyterabbit.

I just tend to find it annoying when somebody on here starts a message thread with a question, then a few people give reasonable answers, then somebody else comes along and instead of focussing on the question from the thread, uses it as an excuse to tear into other people. So I shall not say anything more on this thread myself, because I said my piece and I gave my own answer to the original question some time ago.

[Meffy]

oh and I just took a look at the only reference I could find to scanner synthesis and the document I read described a physical modelling technique which uses a table of modes of vibration taken from a vibrating body or string that has been scanned - so this is a form of physical modelling

There are several good references to scanning synthesis. I've seen it represented in two ways -- or possibly there are two different techniques going by this name; I'm not up-to-date on this. One of them appears to be a kind of PM involving using a "shaped hammer" to impose a piece of wave form on a ring-shaped string. The other involves tracing shapes on a two-dimensional wavetable-like surface, varying the shapes at "haptic rates" (those in the range a musician's muscles can manage) for natural-sounding articulation. Sometimes the articulations are the only natural-sounding things about scanning synthesis patches. :-)

[Sicklecell666]

I just tend to find it annoying when somebody on here starts a message thread with a question, then a few people give reasonable answers, then somebody else comes along and instead of focussing on the question from the thread, uses it as an excuse to tear into other people.

Yeah, kinda like your nasty little habit of inserting yourself in other dev's announcement threads to boost your own crap, right? I agree, it's very annoying..

So I shall not say anything more on this thread myself, because I said my piece and I gave my own answer to the original question some time ago.

promise?

[aciddose]

personally, i think we humans now understand a majority of the
basic theory of audio. and there is a difference between the basic theory, and the way in which we represent or express that basic theory.

alot of people seem to forget how simple audio really is, much
like for example, light really is. we have studied and understood the system which our ears and our eyes give us an aproximate expression of.

anyway, my point is, although the system behind it is extremely
simple (in a macro sence), what makes us see red green and blue,
or hear the way we do, are our own eyes and our ears. so our sence of audio, and video, is inherently highly subjective.

what seems important to me isnt that we try to learn something more of the systems which we operate on top of, but rather find our own ways to express ourselves through these systems.

for example, you can do alot with a simple subtractive synthesizer that someone would never hear and say "its subtractive." not because it is very unique, but because that type of thing has never been associated directly and often expressed in that form, subtractive synthesis.

our vision is terrible, its limitations are extreme, but can anyone say, just because the painter uses the same paint we have used for thousands of years, slight modifications in the brush and technique applied cannot produce unique paintings?

a synthesizer does not need to have oscillator->filter->amplifier, with LFOs and ADSR envelopes controlling every parameter, it can be done in a great verity of ways.

so, the argument occuring here would seem to be a confusion of the two different parts to synthesis here, theory, and expression.

(i've said the same thing about linear electronics and digital electronics, they are simply two ways of expressing the same theory, math.)

so dont get yer panties in a knot :'(
go make something unique..

did you know you can use a digital delay line as frequency modulation tuned with the right delay time and modulation index to produce a combination of arpeggio, echo, and quantinization in the frequency and amplitude axis?

http://xhip.cjb.net/temp/sparkle_dots.mp3