Exactly. This is just because most of physical modeling algorithms are made to directly derive "the coefficients" from things like "material", "stiffness" or "dump".Fluky wrote:but rather they've been abstracted to meaningful parameters such as "material", "stiffness" in this synth:.
Contrary, nothing in an FM or PWM synth can be thought of as a "material". It's not a problem to make some FM patch where certain parameter (or set of parameters) can be mapped to a knob named "material", but this will apply to this particular patch only, thus for this thing to make sense you'll have to hide anything else and limit tweaking to those predefined patched with predefined "macro" parameters. It's nothing wrong with such approach and such instruments were made from time to time, but apparently they just did not get popular.
Actually, even for a Physical Modeling synths, those parameters are not always as friendly you could expect (unless the synth is intentionally limited to two or three knobs and the rest of parameters are totally hidden from you). For example, in the Chromatophone choose any "more abstract" sound preset (anything that does not sound like bell/drum) and you'll find that neither "material" nor "stiffness" parameters has anything to do with "material"/"stiffness" anymore.