Csound and Synthesis and general catch-up

Fellow Tuners,

Hi, After a bit of a hiatus from the group Iwanted to say sorry I could not
have been here more--I've been busy with trying to do a limited release of an
album with my friend Andy Hasenpflug....

Have been following some of the threads (superficially). Carl, you made an
interesting comment about additive synthesis in the digital medium, saying
that it produced a 'sterile sound'. Is it the digital or the additive you
object to? Can you elaborate on your comments re:Bill Sethares' music?

I was intrigued by the mention, months back, of hex lattices of various
temperaments. I brushed up on postscript to make my own of 19-equal. I wish I
had it during the composition of 'The Juggler'. Things might have gone faster
compositionally if I didn't have to do modular arithmetic base 19 (but then
again, my choices might have, too--is that neccessarily a good thing?)

about Csound....Gene, to make no clicks happen on fast attacks, I think you
have to instruct the wave not to reinitiate during legato, which gives a
smoother sound, due to the fact that the signal doesn't make a dramatic jump
in amplitude. Set the phase argument in the OSCIL opcode to -1, that should
do the trick.

My biggest gripe with Csound is that the midi interface sucks, at least on
Linux. Has anyone successfully NOT crashed their computer experimenting with
Csound midi?

Monz, I hope you feel better...trust me on this--you want to get rid of any
ear, nose, throat cold/infection? Two words---nasal douche!!!! tkae 1/4 tsp.
of salt, mix with 1c of lukewarm water, and snort until you gag it out of
your mouth--unpleasant, but it will cut your illness time in half. I do it
everytime I get something, and I'm much happier!

How 'bout the Democrats? We actually might beat Bush in November!

All best,
Aaron.

--
OCEAN, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made
for man -- who has no gills. -Ambrose Bierce 'The Devils Dictionary'

>Have been following some of the threads (superficially). Carl, you
>made an interesting comment about additive synthesis in the digital
>medium, saying that it produced a 'sterile sound'. Is it the digital
>or the additive you object to? Can you elaborate on your comments
>re:Bill Sethares' music?

It's a well-worn criticism of digital additive. Analog additive is
well known for sounding "phat", etc. etc. -- anything but sterile.
Digital wavetable doesn't sound sterile. But digital additive tends
to. I have no idea why. I still think digital additive is our
best hope for a real electronic instrument, unless somebody can
surmount the hurdles facing physical modeling.

Sethares' music may also get some of its sterility from the tempered
timbres, though. I think that's what I was trying to say in that
thread.

>How 'bout the Democrats? We actually might beat Bush in November!

I will reply on metatuning in a few seconds.

-Carl

Carl Lumma wrote:

> It's a well-worn criticism of digital additive. Analog additive is
> well known for sounding "phat", etc. etc. -- anything but sterile.
> Digital wavetable doesn't sound sterile. But digital additive tends
> to. I have no idea why. I still think digital additive is our
> best hope for a real electronic instrument, unless somebody can
> surmount the hurdles facing physical modeling.

I've had very little experience with analog additive, but the sine waves of the ancient synthesizers I remember were not quite pure, and it was pretty much impossible to get them exactly in tune with each other. So you'll naturally get subtle beating effects and complexities of timbre that take more effort to achieve deliberately with digital additive. Wavetable synthesis can only sound as good as the original samples, and can sound really awful if you can hear the looping of a sample. Increasing the pitch of a sample can make the loops more obvious. You can also get a "sterile digital additive" effect with wavetable synthesis by starting with a digital additive sample (such as the "brass" instruments of my Mizarian Porcupine Overture).

> Sethares' music may also get some of its sterility from the tempered
> timbres, though. I think that's what I was trying to say in that
> thread.

The thing about the tempered timbres is that they lose some of their coherence as the partials go in and out of phase with each other. This tends to sound a bit unnatural with sustained timbres, but works well for plucked string sounds; the guitars and harps in Sethares' music sound almost normal. Heavy use of chorus effects (like the flutes in Mizarian Porcupine Overture, which started as an actual recorder sample) can also help to reduce the unnaturalness of the sound.

At 11:23 AM 2/29/2004, you wrote:
>Carl Lumma wrote:
>
>> It's a well-worn criticism of digital additive. Analog additive is
>> well known for sounding "phat", etc. etc. -- anything but sterile.
>> Digital wavetable doesn't sound sterile. But digital additive tends
>> to. I have no idea why. I still think digital additive is our
>> best hope for a real electronic instrument, unless somebody can
>> surmount the hurdles facing physical modeling.
>
>I've had very little experience with analog additive, but the sine waves
>of the ancient synthesizers I remember were not quite pure, and it was
>pretty much impossible to get them exactly in tune with each other. So
>you'll naturally get subtle beating effects and complexities of timbre
>that take more effort to achieve deliberately with digital additive.

Yes, that's right. But it doesn't explain why digital additive should
sound more sterile than the sample you're resynthesizing.

>> Sethares' music may also get some of its sterility from the tempered
>> timbres, though. I think that's what I was trying to say in that
>> thread.
>
>The thing about the tempered timbres is that they lose some of their
>coherence as the partials go in and out of phase with each other. This
>tends to sound a bit unnatural with sustained timbres, but works well
>for plucked string sounds; the guitars and harps in Sethares' music
>sound almost normal. Heavy use of chorus effects (like the flutes in
>Mizarian Porcupine Overture, which started as an actual recorder sample)
>can also help to reduce the unnaturalness of the sound.

I'd love to hear more about how you achieved microtonal resythesis
of a recorder sample using Cool Edit!

-Carl

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Herman Miller <hmiller@I...> wrote:

This
> tends to sound a bit unnatural with sustained timbres, but works well
> for plucked string sounds; the guitars and harps in Sethares' music
> sound almost normal. Heavy use of chorus effects (like the flutes in
> Mizarian Porcupine Overture, which started as an actual recorder
sample)
> can also help to reduce the unnaturalness of the sound.

If that's what you want--Joseph *adores* that sound. The sad thing is
that he won't get anything like it detuning miracle.

Carl Lumma wrote:
> > I'd love to hear more about how you achieved microtonal resythesis
> of a recorder sample using Cool Edit!
> Basically I took the sample (which I'd already copied over itself several times to achieve a chorus effect before I thought of retuning it) used the FFT filter to isolate each of the partials of the sound, and saved each partial as a separate WAV file. Actually, I mixed partials 1, 2, 4, 8 ... into a single file; the same with 3, 6, 9, and so on, which saved some time, since I wasn't doing any octave stretching, just fitting them to ET scales. Then I resampled the partials at a different pitch to match the 15-ET tuning; some of the samples ended up slightly longer or shorter, but I don't remember exactly how I resolved that (probably just cut off the ends of the longer samples).

In contrast, the "brass" instruments were done by mixing together sine waves rounded off to the nearest 1 Hz, so that they'd loop seamlessly after precisely 1 second, saving the mixed sine waves as a sample, and using the built-in filters and envelope generators of the AWE32 to add a "brassy" attack to the sound.

>> I'd love to hear more about how you achieved microtonal resythesis
>> of a recorder sample using Cool Edit!
>>
>
>Basically I took the sample (which I'd already copied over itself
>several times to achieve a chorus effect before I thought of retuning
>it) used the FFT filter to isolate each of the partials of the sound,
>and saved each partial as a separate WAV file. Actually, I mixed
>partials 1, 2, 4, 8 ... into a single file; the same with 3, 6, 9, and
>so on, which saved some time, since I wasn't doing any octave
>stretching, just fitting them to ET scales. Then I resampled the
>partials at a different pitch to match the 15-ET tuning; some of the
>samples ended up slightly longer or shorter, but I don't remember
>exactly how I resolved that (probably just cut off the ends of the
>longer samples).

That rocks.

>In contrast, the "brass" instruments were done by mixing together sine
>waves rounded off to the nearest 1 Hz, so that they'd loop seamlessly
>after precisely 1 second, saving the mixed sine waves as a sample, and
>using the built-in filters and envelope generators of the AWE32 to add
>a "brassy" attack to the sound.

I only have a 128kbps version of this, I think. Can you furnish
anything better?

-Carl

Carl Lumma wrote:

> I only have a 128kbps version of this, I think. Can you furnish
> anything better?

I have the original wav file, but it's huge. The highest quality OGG is still pretty big, about 12.1 MB; the default quality OGG is only about 3.4 MB. Can you play OGG files?

>> I only have a 128kbps version of this, I think. Can you furnish
>> anything better?
>
>I have the original wav file, but it's huge. The highest quality OGG is
>still pretty big, about 12.1 MB; the default quality OGG is only about
>3.4 MB. Can you play OGG files?

Yes, and I'll take the 12 megger if you can host it.

-Carl

Carl Lumma wrote:

> Yes, and I'll take the 12 megger if you can host it.
> > -Carl

Well, it seems my new Comcast account has 25MB of web space, so here it is:

http://home.comcast.net/~teamouse/porcupine.zip

>Well, it seems my new Comcast account has 25MB of web space,
>so here it is:
>
>http://home.comcast.net/~teamouse/porcupine.zip

Got it. Thanks dude!

Incidentally, this hosting is very cheap, if nothing else:

http://ace-host.net/specialplan.html

-Carl