Jim Menard jimm@io.com wrote:
How about doing what the Roland D-50 introduced commercially (I've forgotten the correct name): play a sample at the beginning of a note then use a simpler, repetitive waveform for the rest of the note. It's the complex wave in the first 100 to 300 ms that the ear uses to identify the instrument.
LoopedSampledSound supports precisely this functionality. The hard part is that a one-cycle loop sounds static and dead, since it has none of the little fluctuations of pitch, timbre, and loudness that characterize a real musical instrument. Some of the "life" can be put back in (we hope) via pitch and loudness envelopes, perhaps with some randomness, and some of the timbral dynamics might be added via a variable lowpass filter or by using FM wave distortion techniques. There are lots of things to try, which makes it fun! Of course, the major synth vendors have been working on this very problem for at least a decade, but they tend to keep the details of their best ideas to themselves for some reason... :->
I don't expect to find a trick that the synth manufactures have missed, but I'll be happy if we re-discover some known techniques that give us good quality sounds in Squeak. And you never know where the ability to explore sound synthesis in a dynamic environment like Squeak may lead...
-- John
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