Computer Music, Composition

GSynth

Granular Synthesis Papers:

• GSynth A Granular Synthesis Music Composition and Effects Processing.
• GSynth Tools Granular Synthesis Music Composition.

The GSynth project is a musical composition tool based on the musical theory of granular synthesis. Granular Synthesis combines grains of sound into sound masses. Each grain is typically a very short-duration sound event comprised of a frequency, duration, amplitude, starting time, and an envelope. Sound masses are created by the combination of potentially thousands of sound grains to form musical compositions. GSynth provides an easy method for creating sound masses when experimenting with Granular Synthesis techniques. The original ascii file based GSynth program [Schalkhauser and Hoepfinger 1993] made use of a text file as its input for sound mass definitions. In this implementation, the original tty GSynth program is used as the foundation for a GUI based version of the program as well as adding a musical effects processor. The GSynth GUI provides the user with graphical input of sound mass parameters, a visual representation of sound mass component transforms, and a graphical method for editing the grain envelope. Also developed with the GUI are a new set of preferences which are used to further define the sound mass attributes and therefore add another dimension to the flexibility of sound mass creation. The musical effects processor, Effects Editor, takes English language definitions of musical effects and applies the characteristics to a GSynth sound mass. The main processor of the Effects Editor is a rule-based system. The rules of the rule-based system are based on an English language format. An effect is defined by building a set of rules specifying how the effect modifies a sound mass. Combining the Effects Editor and the GSynth GUI pro vides a useful tool for experimenting and exploring the technique of Granular Synthesis.

Seawave

Seawave Paper , published in Computer Music Journal, Vol 18, No 1, pg 30-39, Spring 1994.

Music technology enthusiasts have waited many years for synthesizers that allow easy creation of new and interesting timbres. Presently, musicians must learn the intricacies of synthesizer programming, or rely on sounds which are provided for them. Even with the advent of sophisticated graphical patch-editing software there remain significant drawbacks in the way people specify tone quality on a synthesizer. Timbre is most commonly specified by a large collection of numerical parameters peculiar to a given synthesis technique. Unfortunately, these raw numbers do not relate in any obvious way to the quality of the resulting timbres. In fact, a strong background in synthesis theory has always been a prerequisite for the effective creation of timbre. Despite the fact that musicians possess a very rich vocabulary for describing musical timbre, conventional synthesizers are unable to make use of it. This inability is a source of frustration for musicians who typically wish to describe timbral characteristics in words. It is this semantic gap between musician and machine which our paper addresses. We present a software system called SeaWave in which musical timbres can be transformed and synthesized based on a vocabulary of descriptive terms, rather than a large list of numerical parameters.