Am I confused about wavetable

[Albert.VST]

Face it, no one is horribly confused by what is meant when someone says "square wave". Two syllables, rolls off the tongue nicely. Maybe there's a point I'm not catching from you, but I guess that' means you'll have to give another go at saying why...

Face it, at least few are horribly confused by what is meant when someone says "Wavetable Synthesis".

In the context of wavetable synthesis a wavetable is a collection of single cycle waveforms.

which part of the term would you say explicitly refers to a scanning mechanism? the word 'wavetable' or the word 'synthesis'?

But what would be the use of it if there would be no means to scan through them during the duration of a single note.
No matter how complex they can be in single or multiple cycles, they would only be preset oscillator waveforms. Just as e.g. the ancient Korg DW6000/8000 series had (or Roland's LA synthesis that used a crossfaded sequence of waves), but this isn't considered wavetable synthesis afaik.
But maybe this is even confusing more

[whyterabbyt]

But what would be the use of it if there would be no means to scan through them during the duration of a single note.

well, firstly, to be pedantic, remember you have to scan through any single-cycle wavetable to read the data out of it.

but quite a lot can be done with reading multiple single-cycle wavetables, not sequentially, but in parallel. Basically, you can read from N wavetables in parallel and dynamically mix between them, in a variety of ways (eg crossfading two waves over time).

For example, a certain amount of research appears to have been done in utilising this to generate specific dynamic evolutions of spectra as a means of emulating e.g. real acoustic instruments. (http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=7003)

[jens]

It's only similar in the sense that SOMETHING is getting modulated with SOMETHING. The methods of modulation are completely different between those syntheses.

What I meant is that theoretically you can get similar transitions between various waveforms with any of them.... so while the synthesis-techniques are totally different, the results are not neccessarily.

I now had the time to prepare two quick examples in order to illustrate what I mean:



http://www.prinziphoffnung.com/mp3/SineToSaw1.mp3

http://www.prinziphoffnung.com/mp3/SineToSaw1.mp3


One of these files uses wavetable-synthesis (or whatever you want to call it) to morph from a sinewave to a sawwave, the other one FM (PM) - and albeit I guess it won't be too hard to figure out which is which, you'll surely admit that both synthesizers do something similar here.

Since this minor post appears to have been buried beneath the *cough* greatness of the rest of this thread, I'll be so impertinent as to drag it to the surface again. I hereby apologize for actually talking about synthesis.

[aciddose]

do i really need to link the yuck yuck guy again?

[jens]

So you don't like the melody? Or is it the musical style? Or the sound of the filter? The rhythm? The chords progression?

[aciddose]

http://xhip.presetexchange.com/temp/wtfhaha.mp3

[jens]

Troll.

[EvilDragon]

It's only similar in the sense that SOMETHING is getting modulated with SOMETHING. The methods of modulation are completely different between those syntheses.

What I meant is that theoretically you can get similar transitions between various waveforms with any of them.... so while the synthesis-techniques are totally different, the results are not neccessarily.

I now had the time to prepare two quick examples in order to illustrate what I mean:



http://www.prinziphoffnung.com/mp3/SineToSaw1.mp3

http://www.prinziphoffnung.com/mp3/SineToSaw2.mp3

Well (after I fixed your link for the second example there), I see your point that similar things can be achieved in some (but not all) cases. A more complex wavetable example would likely be impossible to be done in an FM synth, and vice versa.


First one is FM, second one wavetable scanning, of course. Easily noticeable.