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As you wish:
https://soundcloud.com/geekmansworld/skytrain
You might want to use headphones, as the stereo effects are pretty essential. Made entirely from 4 samples (the three I uploaded and one other you'll recognize pretty quickly) in CSound, which is a C-based "sound programming language". So, the "score" for the composition is about 350 lines of C-like code.
No, the time spent at low power is too short to be able to react to. AC wall power is 60 Hz, so it cycles 60 times a second. Which means it completes each whole sine wave in fractions of a second. It's only at a lower power state for milliseconds.
For reference, a sine wave. What happens in one 1/60th a second in your AC wall line. The center line is 0. http://www.csounds.com/ezine/winter1999/beginner/sine.gif
I don't know of any consumer applications of it. It's not a practical way to make cool sounds as much as an awesome way to geek-out if you're a synth nerd like me. Here is a Csound page about it. It's essentially wavetable synthesis, but instead of running a phasor across a 2-dimensional waveform with the Y-axis being the output, you run an "orbiter" across a 3 (or more) dimensional terrain (the Y-axis still being the output).
Since most students weren't programmers, we used Reaktor. Here is an example of a basic function-based wave terrain synth - function-based as in actually calculated on the fly rather than legitimately read from a 3D table, since you can't load any type of 3D table into Reaktor (or at least couldn't in 2009). On the left is a display of the calculated terrain (from the top down). On the right is the path of the orbiter.
Here is a video of the two superimposed over each other using this approach. Note that the sound is modulated both with altering the path of the orbiter as well as altering the terrain itself. You can see the effect of mapping envelopes to the axes of the orbiter around 5 minutes in.
I should dig through my old archives to see if I can find these old reaktor files.
Ah, spectral morphing. It's really difficult to do well, and that's why people pay lots of money for Kyma and/or Zynaptiq to do it properly. That's the sad, sad truth of it, and honestly, I've never heard anything do it as well as the Kyma algorithms.
Now, that being said, you can get pretty good results with open-source solutions like the plugins from Michael Norris and the Csound language. I say try the Norris plugins first and see if you can get some good results.
> Has somebody taken the time to carefully measure the sounds produced by different instruments and determine their exact ratio of overtones?
I don't think there's any one catalog like that, but lots of researchers have done that kind of analysis for additive synthesis. For example, check out this article, which explains a process for using Max/MSP to analyze gamelan percussion samples and then Csound to synthesize them. (Well, it's probably not super clear what's going on if you're not familiar with Max or Csound, but hopefully you can kinda get the main idea of what happened.)
Aside from doing "manual" analysis or coding up your own automated solution (like the Csound/Max article), there are a number of modern plugins and software solutions that can automatically analyze and resynthesize any sound you throw at them--it's basically like doing a Fourier transform but then resynthesizing with a bank of oscillators instead of by using an inverse Fourier transform. This approach saves you all the trouble of measuring partials by hand and tracking their amplitude over time.
Some examples of software that can do that are Image-Line's Harmor, SPEAR (has the option to synthesize with sinusoids instead of through inverse FFT), and Csound (through various additive synthesis opcodes).
What's basically expected from you as downloader of these files is that you run it through your native C++ compiler and build the program specifically for your operating system and hardware architecture.
This is definitely not easy to do without some form of expertise, sorry to say. I did find this page to put it into more of a context, perhaps?
There are really multiple aspects to audio programming : pure digital signal processing theory (mainly maths), stuff surrounding audio (working with soundcards, audio libraries, etc...) and optimization techniques in order to squeeze the most juice from the computer.
A very good book that covers a lot of these aspects is the aptly titled Audio Programming Book.
You can also look into the "visual" programming tools like Max/MSP (paying, nice GUI) and PureData (FOSS, dated GUI), or CSound which is the direct descendant of MUSIC I / II / III / IV / V which were the first software (and we're talking 60's to 80's here) to generate computer music. Finally there is a very nice domain specific language for audio whose goal is to be translated as efficiently as possible in real languages : FaUST.
Csound has python embedded. Nevertheless python is not used to define the various synthesis instruments, but you could write the score using python or any other programming language for that matter.
Supercollider is a functional composition language for audio synthesis and composition, but to use it you have to learn a new programming language: supercollider.
There are other similar programs as well.
There's a large github repo of csound instruments at /ReneNyffenegger/csound-instruments.
Also, a few things at www.csounds.com/mikelson/
That track is 100% Csound. If you want a vague idea of what it's capable of, here's the reference manual. It's been in development since 1985. I don't know of a digital sound synthesis method that it can't do. Even really uncommon stuff like scanned synthesis.
The community is a bit dead, and it's not the easiest to learn, but it's completely free and open-source. The best place to gets started is with the floss manual. I find the included editor (CsoundQT) is bunk. At least it was a few years back which was the last time I tried to use it. I write my CSDs (the file format Csound compiles) in Notepad++ and use command line to compile them.
I've been emulating DX11-ish sounds using this excellent PDF and slathering it in pitch shifted reverb. It's really big sounding, so I've been using some really minimal structures. Nothing too intrusive since I intend to use it in a game I'm coding in Godot on the side. This is track 3 of 15 or so I've put together so far. Everything is done in CSound with PC.
I've also been using CSound's "scanned synthesis" opcodes to try and find some original sounds, and it's, well, incredibly unwieldy.
I just bought a Neutron, so I suspect I'll be back at the hardware for the foreseeable future.
My guess is you're using the term in some idiosyncratic way possibly from a specific synth architecture or maybe thats a really old-school jargon for something like what you're talkung about, but it seems like the prevalent usage (certainly what im used to) is similar to this csound module: http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/exciter.html
"Filtered distortion to add brilliance to a signal" Accept one audio input, has control to select desired frequency range (where harmonics will be enhanced), to select amount of harmonics (how strong the effect is) and to crossfade between even and odd harmonics (tone). I use it on psytrance squelches to make them crispier
Here's an article you may find helpful. "Building an FM oscillator in the Eurorack format using Csound, a Raspberry Pi, and an Arduino Uno"
Have you studied this information? http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/MiscFormants.html
A formant is a resonant band, or a group of such bands, in a sound's spectrum. For example, as the chart shows, an alto singing the vowel "a" will have peaks in the spectrum around 800, 1150, 2800, 3500, and 4950 Hz. Each of those bands has a unique bandwidth and amplitude (also shown in the chart).
Since formants are resonant bands, they can be created by filtering a sound with a bandpass filter. 5 bandpass filters in parallel, each tuned to the correct frequency, bandwidth, and level, could filter a pulse wave or other rich sound source, and create an emulation of that "a" vowel.
I'm still on the beginners level of programming sound and all I've done so far is use Csound via a raspberry pi for a COSMO effects pedal, so unfortunately I don't have any good sources for you. I just skimmed google and saw there were some pages mentioning the subject so you might have to do some extensive search and research on that topic. I was originally looking for the name of another programming language suitable for your needs that I saw a generative project on some time ago. I did another search while writing this post and actually found it, and it was Pure Data which I have absolutely no experience with but which might also be suitable for your needs. Seems like that project uses some custom code and libraries and there is no idication they were made public.
I learned a lot about Csound by studying the reference manual found on the Csound documentation page and using that to modify some example code included with the COSMO. You might find parts of what you need there, but implementing some sort of algoritm or similar is beyond my scope for the time being.
So this is definitely no longer a DSP question. I would ask your questions on the Csound Mailing list. It's quite active, and they'll be able to answer your questions better than I can. There's also /r/csound, although it is quite sleepy. You can PM too, but I can't guarantee I'll give you any answers.
Seeing as you want to turn on instruments indefinitely, I suggest you look at the turnon opcode, which can be included inside the orchestra outside of instrument definitions.
It's a good question and I'm afraid I don't have an answer off the top of my head. I'll keep thinking about it and if I come up with something I'll drop you a line.
Two things that do occur to me: find a volunteer (or freelancer) who uses MetaSynth. Unfortunately that is a "Mac only" program last time I checked.
Secondly: there is the ever-changing (but fascinating) world of CSound (pronounced "c-sound"). The software is free but the list of people who are proficient is rather small. It's no small undertaking to learn it. Most people start with Richard Boulanger's excellent book.
There are other, equally flexible software environments like Symbolic Sound's Kyma. They usually have a little steeper "first step" commitment. Ah, if I could only win the Lotto!
Here's my vague take on your questions:
Numeric accuracy of Csound depends on what version you're running -- assuming you're using Csound compiled to use doubles (run csound at the command line and it'll tell you right beside the version number), it should have 15–17 significant decimal digits precision according to wikipedia. So I can't answer your question exactly, but you should have minimum 15 decimal digits available.
Maximum score time is probably only limited to disk-space and/or OS file-size limitations if you're writing a file. Minimum instrument time is likewise open-ended, although anything shorter than 30ms is going to be accoustically meaningless, unless you're working with granular synthesis.
Amplitude is one of the more challenging parts of Csound. Amplitude values are ultimately correlated to the sample format you're working with, making it somewhat convoluted. I'd recommend reading the section on Amplitude from the Csound Book and also looking up the 0dbfs opcode which explains the old technique of working with amplitude and the "newer" method utilizing this opcode.
Ok, maybe not exactly as detailed answers as you were looking for, but that's all I've got.
You can do this by artificially adding low level noise and jitter to things like pitch and filter cutoff. I do this all the time in Csound using the jitter opcode. I haven't needed to use a VST in years, so I can't really answer your question. Sorry.
I played around with this in college. There are several ways to achieve this, but it sounds like they used in-ear mics for this one. In my labs I used Csound's hrtfer.. it's a fun topic.
How closely related are they to that old-looking one? (begins with a C---ah, CSound. Silly me, I was looking for CAudio earlier.)
Interesting, there is a page for a "Max external to run CSound 5".