Real-time additive / FM synthesis with 878 oscillators on NanoPI NEO2 Cluster

Fragment is an online collaborative programmable noise-of-all-kinds realtime audio / visual software.

This video demonstrate additive / FM synthesis on a fully used full height canvas (439 oscillators at the same time per channels, 878 oscillators at the same time on this video), the sound is produced on a cluster of 8 x headless Nano PI NEO2 with Netjack2 and 4 instances of the Fragment sound server.

The Nano PI is a 10$ small board computer, 300€ is the total cost of the setup with the 16 ports switch, 2 x 5 USB ports power adapter and ETH/microUSB cables, advantages of using a Nano PI is that you could just add more 10$ boards and increase the possibilities, octacore boards may be an even better option.

This session use up to three images plus feedback, images are rendered Fragment sequences.

FM synthesis start at @30:00.

32 instances (4 / NanoPI) of the sound server are in use and distribute sounds over the network to a desktop machine.

The average load for each boards is on the order of 40% for additive and simple FM, the crackles is due to the client browser reflow (and too many process running on the desktop machine) and i suspect some issues with network load (maybe the switch ?)

The sound server settings is 96000Hz, 1024 frames buffer, 4 output L/R channels max, 250MB is used.

The client, jack server and renoise run on a desktop machine.

Renoise DAW is used to apply reverberation.

You can try the Fragment synthesizer now at : https://www.fsynth.com

Documentation: https://www.fsynth.com/documentation

Forum : https://quiet.fsynth.com