but i guess describing those things an non-linear processes is a bit much for some people this idea that physmod is only a few techniques is a bit of a new thing really. Not implying we were the first at all obviously, wendy carlos and tomita were running rings round anything we did before we even knew what music wasīut like, there are literally tons of ways you can make fake things out of other things. We've been blagging sounds for years, way way before we heard anyone using the term physical modellingĮven just using a 202 you can make really mad 'bonk' sounds by tuning the resonance and using the res env a certain way (think of voodoo ray by gerald) Lot of loaded questions here tbh but i'll say this simple overview, including some soft synth alternatives. While physical modeling can produce convincing sounds with a potential expressiveness that no sample based instrument will ever match, it's base sound still doesn't sound as 'real' as a properly sampled instrument, recorded in a nice room with good microphones. At a time where 128MB of RAM was still quite a lot, this was quite revolutionary. Resulting in a sampled piano that could span multiple gigabytes. This made it possible to have sampled instruments where for example each key of a piano was sampled at various velocity/loudness values. It was the first sampler (as far as I can remember) that could playback samples from hard disk, by only keeping the first second or so of the samples in memory. Yamaha experimented with this in the 90s with their VL series physical modeling synths, but it never caught on, mostly I think because if you want to have convincing results, you really need alternative midi controllers like a breath controller for woodwind and brass intruments.Īn alternative take on why physical modeling synths never really caught on is GigaSampler. > The whole experience made me suspect that there's an alternative approach to building modular synths, based on physical facts about sound But I'm not an expert and can't figure out fully how such a synth would work. It would be similar to physically based rendering in graphics: for example, it would enforce a physically correct relationship between how high a harmonic is and how long it rings, and maybe some other relationship about what happens to harmonics at the start of the sound, etc. The whole experience made me suspect that there's an alternative approach to building modular synths, based on physical facts about sound (as opposed to either starting with oscillators, or going all the way to digital modeling of strings and bows). For example, here's a short formula I came up with a month ago for generating a pluck-like sound: It's much simpler than doing the same with prebuilt bricks. You need to learn some math about how sound works, but then you'll be unstoppable. If I could go back and give advice to my months-younger self, I'd tell me to skip oscillators and filters, and jump straight into generating the sound with code. Also I can get inharmonicity, smearing of harmonics (like in PADsynth algorithm), and other nice things that are out of reach if you start with periodic oscillators. This way I can mimic some nice properties of physical sounds, like "the nth harmonic has initial amplitude 1/n and decay time 1/n". Workflow 4: write code to generate the sound on the fly, as a sequence of samples. This gave me some more interesting and configurable echoes, but then why start with an oscillator at all? So Workflow 3: generate an impulse response wav file with Python, and use that in a convolution reverb to filter the sawtooth. For impulse responses, use random sounds downloaded from the internet (like wood strikes), or mixtures of existing instrument sounds. Workflow 2: feed a sawtooth oscillator through a convolution reverb that uses a custom impulse response. Eventually I realized that it will always sound mechanical, no matter how many filters you stack. Workflow 1: feed a sawtooth oscillator through filters controllable with knobs. I went through a succession of different workflows, spending a couple weeks on each. This winter I went down this rabbit hole and back up, trying to approximate some acoustic instrument sounds.
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