Digital Sound, Additive and Wavetable Synthesis

Lecture Slides

A series of gif images of the lecture slides... (only accesible from within Stanford University)

Digital Sound

Sound representation
Transducers
ADC and DAC converters
- Sampling theorem (Nyquist)
- Aliasing
- Quantization

Additive and Wavetable Synthesis

Periodic waveform synthesis

f(t)=sum,k=0,...(Ak*sin(kwt+Qk)) [Moore 210]

Partial based synthesis

f(t)=sum,k=0,...(Ak*sin(wkt+Qk)) [Moore 210]

Time varying synthesis

Ak=f(t)
Wk=f(t)
Qk=f(t)

Examples

A very simple wavetable instrument (wavetable.ins)
A very simple three partial additive instrument (additive.ins)
The frequency sweep instrument used for the aliasing examples (sweep.clm)

If you happen to login to NeXT black hardware you can play around with the WaveEdit.app application (implements real time wavetable synthesis, very nice to get the concept of time and frequency domains). Another nice NEXTSTEP application is Spectro.app, a soundfile analysis tool.

To probe further

Create a CLM instrument that can interpret and play the steady state spectral data that is part of "/usr/ccrma/lisp/src/clm/spectr.clm".