sound synthesis from 3D rotation

[doctornash]

The idea was to generate sound from the motion of the vertices of rotating 3D polygons. Here's one possible implementation - I've called the app 'Rotatosound', whose full source code is here:
https://www.purebasic.fr/english/viewto ... 14&t=71341
I'd be interested in any other ideas you may have to extend/evolve it.
Demo video:
https://youtu.be/OtjPJXZMNf4

[synthpark]

Do you have any specific application in mind?
Either the sounds help the user to get a better overview in CAD,

or it would have something to do with music. But here I don't see any real potential as you can create sound or declare what waveform to regard as sound in 1 million different arbitrary ways.

So traditionally the main driving factor for developers was to imitate acoustic instruments. Another point of view was to explore existing analog electronic technology in a more or less straight forward form. Later FM technology was again mainly used to again immitate acoustic instruments.

But nowadays you can create waveforms in any arbitrary kind of way, and the actual idea is motivated by how the human ears perceives musically meaningful sound. As your idea might appeal original, the created sound is so far rather limited.

[JoaCHIP]

What an interesting approach, and thanks for explaining it so well. I quite like it almost resembles the human voice at certain settings, especially the "fish plane".

Considering how many synthesizers are just iterations over the same fundamental principles, I think it's always relevant to look at new ways of generating things like oscillators, filters and envelopes.

I'm not sure I like the "pulse" feature though. It seems a bit arbitrary and out of relation to the 3D object. But great project all in all! Keep it up.

[doctornash]

Considering how many synthesizers are just iterations over the same fundamental principles, I think it's always relevant to look at new ways of generating things like oscillators, filters and envelopes

Thanks for your support. Yes all the apps I've created over the past few years have been based on what might be called 'non standard sound synthesis', by casting all manner of processes, functions, mathematical models and algorithms into the audio range. As you can imagine, there is a vast untapped source of material to draw on for these adaptations - some experiments do hit dead ends, some amount to little more than curiosities or 'one trick ponies' while others actually yield a wide enough, different enough and controllable enough sound palette to be useful.

I'm not sure I like the "pulse" feature though. It seems a bit arbitrary and out of relation to the 3D object

Yes you are absolutely right that the pulsing is not directly derived or translated from the behaviour of the 3D object. I just left it in as an effect, as with certain objects it reminded me of variations of the 'woody woodpecker' laugh

[davidguda]

Always fun with new ideas like this. I have a hard time seeing how I could use this in music though.
It is a great video with nice and thorough explanations.

[cron]

Visionary stuff as always Dr Nash.

With regard to ideas, you might like to look at Soundemote's SpiralGenerator and Xoxos' geometry trilogy (Outer, Black, and Angle) to see what others are doing in (vaguely) the same sort of area. Your implementation is very different though, as your synthesis seems to be abstracted from the geometry whereas the relationship is more direct in the others (i.e., the synthesis produces geometry viewable with an XY phase scope)

Is what you're doing here conceptually similar to scanned synthesis at all? Kind of like an n-dimensional version, with the variation coming from rotation rather than 'excitation'?

[CinningBao]

Ah damn, I meant to comment on this when it was first posted, but I got MASSIVELY distracted going down another rabbit hole of stuff when I watched the video. I f*king LOVE THIS. Beautiful stuff doctornash Maths to synthesis; sweet.

Really close to some iterative landscape to tone/pitch stuff I was doing a few years ago with a nerdy pal, but this is so much better. As Joachip noticed as well, it gets really vocally in places, really lovely. It's great example of complex results from a simple method. Love it. I want to attach the rotational element to my Wii Remote to rotate it with one hand and manipulate the 3d shape with the rest of my body.

If this were implemented in some kind of MIDI controlled synth, I would want, for example, to use the Pulse function as a 'restart oscillator' type thing on every note, or linked to a pulse LFO so I can change the rate of 'restart'.

Is there any potential for that doctornash?

[doctornash]

Appreciate the feedback!

you might like to look at Soundemote's SpiralGenerator and Xoxos' geometry trilogy

I have come across xoxos' instruments, but was not familiar with Spiral Generator - so thanks for pointing that one out. Is there any information on Spiral Generator's core engine - how sound is actually synthesized from the algorithm which generates the fractal spiral?

your synthesis seems to be abstracted from the geometry whereas the relationship is more direct in the others

Yes, here I am deriving a sound waveform from some characteristic(s) of an input image (like I do in paint2sound for example), as opposed to constructing an image from a synthesis method.

Is what you're doing here conceptually similar to scanned synthesis at all?

I hadn't thought of it like that, but given that part of the definition of scanned synthesis is 'scanning out a wave shape from along a path', it may well apply here (as a wave shape is being scanned out from the motion path of the vertices of a 3D object).

Really close to some iterative landscape to tone/pitch stuff I was doing a few years ago

So what method were you using back then, if you don't mind me asking?

If this were implemented in some kind of MIDI controlled synth

Yes what you describe would be neat, but before even getting to any kind of MIDI control, I have to overcome a more fundamental issue - currently the sound doesn't 'smoothly' change when the shape of the object is changed. In order to do so I'd have to make the code more 'statefully aware' throughout. However, it did occur to me at the time that this thing might make an interesting MIDI controller, with the scaled co-ordinate values of each of the vertices transmitted on independent midi channels