WSEAS Transactions on Signal Processing
Print ISSN: 1790-5052, E-ISSN: 2224-3488
Volume 10, 2014
Texture: A Granular Synthesizer for Real-Time Sound Generation
Authors: , , , ,
Abstract: Sound synthesis is a subject where last development of electronics had made a significant boost. Since it’s beginning, it developed on two main branches: on one side it tried to imitate other instruments, trying to re-create sounds that already exist. On the other side, it followed an aim that we can consider someway opposite: producing new sounds, exploring new possibilities, and allowing composers to follow new paradigms in musical composition. Imitating other instruments can be useful for various reasons: the electronic version of an instrument has often very lower cost with respect to the original one, and also lower weight. Besides, it can have some advantages, as the capability to be played by a computer or to use headphones. Producing new sounds, on the other hand, means often better fitting than any acoustic instrument with the idea of a musician. The issue, in this case, is to give the musician the opportunity to easily control all necessary parameters, in order to obtain the desired result. So, while on the first branch we can easily say that the better instruments are the ones that imitate more closely real instruments, on the second branch the variety of produced timbres is important, but it is almost useless if it is not accompanied by a tool to control a huge set of parameters in an efficient way. In this paper, we focused on the production of new sounds, and we present a system called Texture, that generate sounds in real-time. The current version of Texture is available both on Windows and on OSX operating systems, both as a Virtual Studio Technology (VST) and as Audio Units (AU). The system is based on the Granular Synthesis, which is a method that produces complex sounds by mixing together simple elements called “grains”, but it extend the classical method with some new features that bring more richness and variety to the sound. The software comes with a graphical interface and applications that allow to control the synthesis parameters in an effective way, and that give the musician the opportunity to add expression to the sound. This goal is reached by means of neural networks.
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Pages: 601-610
WSEAS Transactions on Signal Processing, ISSN / E-ISSN: 1790-5052 / 2224-3488, Volume 10, 2014, Art. #62