Actually that's incorrect. Fourier Transformation Theory suggests that any sound can be broken down into individual sine waves.Jac459 wrote: ↑Sat May 04, 2024 6:42 am Resynthesis IS NOT equal to sampling my friend.
As you know, additive synthesis is adding simple sine waves in order to recreate more complex waveforms.
"Resynthesis" is about having a spectral analysis of a complex sound and breaking it down to sine waves (so it is the opposite path to additive synthesis).
Using that you can analyze a sound and create complex mathematical equations to represent it using Fourier Analysis. Computers are able to rather quickly take a sample and analyze it's timbre and come up with an equation that represents it.
Then use that data to create a set of instructions for an additive synth engine to recreate it.
Traditionally samplers could play a sample chromatically by changing the playback speed. So you could record say a piano playing C5 and play it back at half speed and it would sound like it was playing an octave lower or C4, play it back at double speed and you are an octave higher at C6. The challenge is that the timbre of a piano changes over time, so playing it back at half speed extends those changes by 100%
Using resynthesis all you are doing is playing back sine waves and you can change the underlying frequencies of them to change the pitch without changing how the timbre evolves over time. New England Digital which was a company made of Ivy League Computer Programmers and Mathematicians was pulling this off 40 years ago in the early 1980s using their Synclavier system which costs more than your average house back then
In 2024 Computers have gotten insanely more powerful, which means you can do a lot more with resynthesis concept. First off they can do a much better job of the original analysis to potentially create a much more accurate equation with more data, and then load that data into a better and more power additive synthesis engine, and you can now have AI and Machine Learning do this even faster and better
The fun and exciting part is you can modify the equation to get different results to feed into the additive engine which can then also be controlled, modulated, and tweaked to get different results. From there the audio can then be sent through other Synthesis processes like Subtractive, FM, Granular, etc, or turned into a Wavetable or even turned into another sample
In 2024 there are many different plugins available that use resynthesis. The difference between them is the quality of the original analysis, the quality of the additive engine, the controls or lack there of, that you as the user has over both, and then what you can do after those things