In the sense of it being more of a "true additive" than Sytrus, indeed.
In the sense of Morphine vs. Harmor, then perhaps no, because Harmor can do much more. It's got more partials (Morphine's 128 vs. Harmor's 516) and plenty of modules for quick abstracted control over them. Morphine lacks those kinds of modules altogether, though in its menus some useful functions may be found.
In other words, Morphine can be good for getting an initial grasp of the idea behind dynamic additive synthesis. Harmor in turn offers many more options, wider sound design capabilities and useful layers of abstraction on top of that.
Yep. That is another area where Harmor positively surprised me: partials can be set both in harmonic series as well as in inharmonic order, with varying ratios and a lot of adjustability.
The overall selection between harmonic/inharmonic is done via module on the left side of the GUI, named "PITCH". When it is set to "Hz", the sinewaves are at multiples of frequencies, initially according to harmonic series. When it's set to "oct", there are n sinewaves per octave (depending on module's settings).
In both cases distribution of sinewaves' pitches can be adjusted, and the pitch initially keytracked; the keytracking can be turned off in ENV > "Articulation" column > "Pitch" > "Keyboard mapping", via setting the response shape to counteract it.
There's also a module called "Prism" intended for stretching distribution of pitches across the spectrum in various ways. Its name makes more sense if one thinks of partials as rays of light: the "Prism" module "bends" them.
Pitches of individual partials can be adjusted via ENV > "Shaping" > "Image selected column", when there is a bitmap loaded in IMG tab.
The simplest example would be:
- making an image 1 pixels wide by 516 pixels high, all of it gray (RGB128 in Photoshop) to set initial offset values at +-0
- loading that image into IMG tab
- selecting "PLANE: Freq" in IMG tab
If the image loaded has several pixels of width, then each pixel on x-axis is a breakpoint or a "frame of animation". So for example, 4px of width and 516px of height (again at RGB128 to initialize the offsets at +-0) gives 4 "frames of animation". The height of 516px results in each pixel corresponding to one partial.
When IMG > "SPEED" parameter ("Image fine speed") is at zero, the animation or scanning - whatever one calls it - can be controlled via IMG > "TIME" parameter (which should perhaps have been named "Position" instead). The envelope of that parameter is in ENV > "Articulation" > "Image time offset" > "Envelope".
(The user experience of all that is exactly as weird and complex as it seems - Harmor really, really needs an UI+UX overhaul to bring its extensive additive capabilities to the front)
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By the way, sorry if the detailed geekiness of my lengthy posts seems weird
I'm excited about the subject in general, and since Harmor is the additive synthesis tool I nowadays know best (many years of RTFM'ing, testing and using in practice), I tend to write a lot about it - especially regarding features that are often hard to discover due to Harmor's quirky GUI.
For my part, it's interesting to read similar posts about other tools.
Via that (as well as checking manuals of synths even before testing them ) a lot of useful knowledge can be discovered - and, perhaps, recalled when a particular job requires a particular feature/tool.
), does up to 2048 partials, maybe?
