The Fight for FM

[living sounds]

If you really were interested in making excellent soft synthesizers you could do the whole dev community a massive favour.

All those words like "meat", "color", "cleanness" and "smoothness"; which in your head have some concrete meaning. They don't. Or rather they mean something specific and definite to you, but to anyone else reading they mean something different and specific to them.

I think I've tried that here over and over again. I've described specific aspects of the sound in as technical a term as possible. And posted examples all the time. But few developers seem to be actually interested.

[nuffink]

If you really were interested in making excellent soft synthesizers you could do the whole dev community a massive favour.

All those words like "meat", "color", "cleanness" and "smoothness"; which in your head have some concrete meaning. They don't. Or rather they mean something specific and definite to you, but to anyone else reading they mean something different and specific to them.

I think I've tried that here over and over again. I've described specific aspects of the sound in as technical a term as possible. And posted examples all the time. But few developers seem to be actually interested.

You conveniently left out a bit of that post. Let me help you...

Gather 'em up. Do some proper, hard research on what these terms actually mean (in the context of hearing) and whether a substantial percentage of people can agree on them. Get the statistics and post 'em up because that's exactly the kind of hard evidence devs need to understand what people want.

You see, without doing some work you're just another little kid screaming "See! This is what I want. Give it to me! Give it to me!".

[MaliceX]

Here's an idea: Run your software FM synths in 22KHz downsampled from 55KHz synthesized processing.

[Aroused by JarJar]

Why? I didn't say "emulating hardware", I said excellent software synthesizers. There's no Yamaha hardware that even comes close to having the meat and color, in conjunction with cleaness and smoothness, of the software example I posted; that's mono, no FX EQ or whatever, and elementary algorithm.

The religious on either side of the silly arguments don't even want to know about these kinds of things of course but whatever.

If you really were interested in making excellent soft synthesizers you could do the whole dev community a massive favour.

All those words like "meat", "color", "cleanness" and "smoothness"; which in your head have some concrete meaning. They don't. Or rather they mean something specific and definite to you, but to anyone else reading they mean something different and specific to them.

Gather 'em up. Do some proper, hard research on what these terms actually mean (in the context of hearing) and whether a substantial percentage of people can agree on them. Get the statistics and post 'em up because that's exactly the kind of hard evidence devs need to understand what people want.

I'll listen but at the moment we haven't even got a common language.

Do you find "phat" and "analog" acceptable terms? From what I see those are the most common "common language" terms discussing software synthesis, and they are both quite ridiculous.

Humorously enough, "analog" is far more ridiculous and meaningless than "phat", for with "phat" you could A/B different sounds and very likely find some kind of general consensus that one is more "phat" than the other, whereas "analog"... well those over a certain age who remember a far more "analog" world, or the younger who are into it, know very well that "analog" can sound all kinds of ways.

"In the tradition of the Shelby Cobra... the new Ford Embezzler3000... it's virtually automotive"

that's about how softsynth discussion often sounds.

Your comments in this thread are worded as informed and level-headed, but they are actually ignorant and, er, "highly eccentric".

Let's take "smoothness" for example. Now we must live with subjective impressions, that's how things are, but "smoothness" in synthesis is not a mysterious term: it can be viewed in an objective and measurable way. And everyone who actually knows what the hell they're talking about already knows how to make smoothness in software synthesis. The real issue in this case is just cost/performance and various implementation tactics. What smoothness "is", for the most part, is a known factor.

Tony, who wrote Sytrus and is in this discussion, certainly knows what smoothness means, for at some point he MUST make decisions about wavetable sizes, interpolation, and control rates, and balance these things with realtime performance and CPU usuage.

And every single person who has ever dealt with these things, unless they really do have a tin ear, knows that there are audible consequences when you compromise "smoothness" (that's mathmatical smoothness, not voodoo). Let's see, "find word" in the Csound book... yes, right there at the very beginning of Chapter One. "As you can see, a sinewave drawn with 16 points of resolution is not particularly smooth..." That's very basic obviously but the concept extends throughout all parameters.

You, nuffink, come across as having some vague and cargo-cult like view of all this, but let me disillusion you if I may: the bulk of it is really quite simple and dry.

If I say, the example I gave is smoother than any Yamaha hardware can do, that's not subjective and it's not a boast, it's just a simple measurable fact. Yamaha hardware simply doesn't run at those kinds or rates, sizes of data, or with so much interpolation. And why should it? Doing so is not commercially practical, and contrary to urban legend, the DX-7 is a very space-age and refined machine anyway. It's running at 57k and has good index scaling- that actually makes it a contender for slique and moderne to this day.

If someone really believes that it is aliasing and errors that makes "FM magic", they can easily put together something in Synth Edit that is orders of magnitude more "warm crunchy and vintage" than a DX-7.

"Color"? If you were a musician or sound designer you wouldn't blink at ancient standard terms like this:

timbre - (music) the distinctive property of a complex sound (a voice or noise or musical sound); "the timbre of her soprano was rich and lovely"; "the muffled tones of the broken bell summoned them to meet

timbre
noun tone, sound, ring, resonance, colour, tonality, tone colour, quality of sound

I think Living Sounds speaks German? So obviously he knows/thinks Klangfarbe as well (which most English-speaking musically "educated" people know as well.)

Obviously the the subjective EFFECTS of "colors" are, well subjective. But "colors" in sound do exist, they can be measured, recorded, synthesized.

And so on. When I use less bog-standard terms, like "meat" ("rich" would be a more ancient and widely accepted term, see the dictionary example) or "real", I deliberately also add statements such as "motion is life..." because I'm not talking about "philosophy", I'm talking about physical realities which I can code. Yes you can deliberately code motion, subjectively euphonic, but objectively existing, into a synthesizer, this is also basic stuff.

Nuffink, you have a chance to listen and learn here. So stop posing as the "grown up" for you speak as an ignorant child.

Judging from other threads, your typical response here would be to get so nasty that the thread gets locked down (and somehow, mysteriously, you don't get banned although some of the insulting blather I've seen from you is libel-case material, not just thread-locking).

Don't do that here. FM is NOT "weak", developers should not cop out on this
issue.

[nuffink]

Why? I didn't say "emulating hardware", I said excellent software synthesizers. There's no Yamaha hardware that even comes close to having the meat and color, in conjunction with cleaness and smoothness, of the software example I posted; that's mono, no FX EQ or whatever, and elementary algorithm.

The religious on either side of the silly arguments don't even want to know about these kinds of things of course but whatever.

If you really were interested in making excellent soft synthesizers you could do the whole dev community a massive favour.

All those words like "meat", "color", "cleanness" and "smoothness"; which in your head have some concrete meaning. They don't. Or rather they mean something specific and definite to you, but to anyone else reading they mean something different and specific to them.

Gather 'em up. Do some proper, hard research on what these terms actually mean (in the context of hearing) and whether a substantial percentage of people can agree on them. Get the statistics and post 'em up because that's exactly the kind of hard evidence devs need to understand what people want.

I'll listen but at the moment we haven't even got a common language.

Do you find "phat" and "analog" acceptable terms? From what I see those are the most common "common language" terms discussing software synthesis, and they are both quite ridiculous.

Humorously enough, "analog" is far more ridiculous and meaningless than "phat", for with "phat" you could A/B different sounds and very likely find some kind of general consensus that one is more "phat" than the other, whereas "analog"... well those over a certain age who remember a far more "analog" world, or the younger who are into it, know very well that "analog" can sound all kinds of ways.

"In the tradition of the Shelby Cobra... the new Ford Embezzler3000... it's virtually automotive"

that's about how softsynth discussion often sounds.

Your comments in this thread are worded as informed and level-headed, but they are actually ignorant and, er, "highly eccentric".

Let's take "smoothness" for example. Now we must live with subjective impressions, that's how things are, but "smoothness" in synthesis is not a mysterious term: it can be viewed in an objective and measurable way. And everyone who actually knows what the hell they're talking about already knows how to make smoothness in software synthesis. The real issue in this case is just cost/performance and various implementation tactics. What smoothness "is", for the most part, is a known factor.

Tony, who wrote Sytrus and is in this discussion, certainly knows what smoothness means, for at some point he MUST make decisions about wavetable sizes, interpolation, and control rates, and balance these things with realtime performance and CPU usuage.

And every single person who has ever dealt with these things, unless they really do have a tin ear, knows that there are audible consequences when you compromise "smoothness" (that's mathmatical smoothness, not voodoo). Let's see, "find word" in the Csound book... yes, right there at the very beginning of Chapter One. "As you can see, a sinewave drawn with 16 points of resolution is not particularly smooth..." That's very basic obviously but the concept extends throughout all parameters.

You, nuffink, come across as having some vague and cargo-cult like view of all this, but let me disillusion you if I may: the bulk of it is really quite simple and dry.

If I say, the example I gave is smoother than any Yamaha hardware can do, that's not subjective and it's not a boast, it's just a simple measurable fact. Yamaha hardware simply doesn't run at those kinds or rates, sizes of data, or with so much interpolation. And why should it? Doing so is not commercially practical, and contrary to urban legend, the DX-7 is a very space-age and refined machine anyway. It's running at 57k and has good index scaling- that actually makes it a contender for slique and moderne to this day.

If someone really believes that it is aliasing and errors that makes "FM magic", they can easily put together something in Synth Edit that is orders of magnitude more "warm crunchy and vintage" than a DX-7.

"Color"? If you were a musician or sound designer you wouldn't blink at ancient standard terms like this:

timbre - (music) the distinctive property of a complex sound (a voice or noise or musical sound); "the timbre of her soprano was rich and lovely"; "the muffled tones of the broken bell summoned them to meet

timbre
noun tone, sound, ring, resonance, colour, tonality, tone colour, quality of sound

I think Living Sounds speaks German? So obviously he knows/thinks Klangfarbe as well (which most English-speaking musically "educated" people know as well.)

Obviously the the subjective EFFECTS of "colors" are, well subjective. But "colors" in sound do exist, they can be measured, recorded, synthesized.

And so on. When I use less bog-standard terms, like "meat" ("rich" would be a more ancient and widely accepted term, see the dictionary example) or "real", I deliberately also add statements such as "motion is life..." because I'm not talking about "philosophy", I'm talking about physical realities which I can code. Yes you can deliberately code motion, subjectively euphonic, but objectively existing, into a synthesizer, this is also basic stuff.

Nuffink, you have a chance to listen and learn here. So stop posing as the "grown up" for you speak as an ignorant child.

Judging from other threads, your typical response here would be to get so nasty that the thread gets locked down (and somehow, mysteriously, you don't get banned although some of the insulting blather I've seen from you is libel-case material, not just thread-locking).

Don't do that here. FM is NOT "weak", developers should not cop out on this
issue.

Splendid stuff. Are you channelling the ghost of AQ? He was the last person who was going to teach me about this stuff.

[nuffink]

... oops, server barf.

[vurt]

If I say, the example I gave is smoother than any Yamaha hardware can do, that's not subjective and it's not a boast, it's just a simple measurable fact.

whats it measured in?
bsps?

[TristezaOrange]

If I say, the example I gave is smoother than any Yamaha hardware can do, that's not subjective and it's not a boast, it's just a simple measurable fact.

whats it measured in?
bsps?

Is it BullShit Per Second, John?

[nuffink]

If I say, the example I gave is smoother than any Yamaha hardware can do, that's not subjective and it's not a boast, it's just a simple measurable fact.

whats it measured in?
bsps?

Leave the lad alone. He's found "smoothing" in the cSound manual. As soon as he finds the functions for "color", "cleanness" and "meat (with extra movement)" he'll deliver the synth we all deserve.

Bless.

[vurt]

well thats my guess.
seemingly the same scale for the majority of these things, which i suppose is why its so complicated.

[herodotus]

But "colors" in sound do exist, they can be measured, recorded, synthesized.

Let's see a chart, then, shall we?

I mean, if this is basic stuff, there should be some sort of sound color chart available for those of us who are less....shall we say....synthetically attuned?

I am sure that any such chart that you produce would instantly win universal assent among all educated people, as it is inconceivable that people could have fundamental disagreements about the meanings of such basic terms, is it not?

[brambos]

This thread is pure comedy gold.

[living sounds]

This thread is pure comedy gold.

No, it's just gone south again.

[Nokenoku]

Yes, too sad .. was quite interesting at some places ...

[whyterabbyt]

Let's take "smoothness" for example. Now we must live with subjective impressions, that's how things are, but "smoothness" in synthesis is not a mysterious term: it can be viewed in an objective and measurable way. And everyone who actually knows what the hell they're talking about already knows how to make smoothness in software synthesis.

So when you say your synth is 'smoother', you just mean it uses larger wavetables, or interpolates them , or oversamples or somesuch? Is that all?

So when someone says they want a 'smooth' sound, one could just basically up the sample rate, yeah?
.
.
.

Let's see, "find word" in the Csound book... yes, right there at the very beginning of Chapter One. "As you can see, a sinewave drawn with 16 points of resolution is not particularly smooth..."

How did you get an electronic copy of that? Im not aware of it being available as any kind of PDF or whatever, and I bought my copy direct from Richard Boulanger himself. It would be nice to keep a copy on my laptop.