Due date: Oct. 5, 2016

Lab and Readings

Read and do the first 2 "Getting Started" JUCE tutorials:

• Getting started with the Projucer
• Manage your Projucer projects (don't spend too much time on this one)

as well as the first two "Audio, MIDI & plug-ins" JUCE tutotials:

• Build a white noise generator
• Control audio levels

Assignment: Making an Additive Synthesizer

First, read the Wikipedia page on additive synthesis. Then download the starter code and run it. If everything goes well, you should see the following application:

This is a simple synthesizer based on a sine wave oscillator. Its frequency and its gain can be controlled using sliders and it can be turned on or off using a checkbox.

For this assignment, you will make your own additive synthesizer. The sine wave oscillator is implemented in its own class (Sine.h) and can be easily duplicated. As explained in the Wiki page, the idea behind additive synthesis is to add the signal of multiple sine wave oscillators together to create complex sounds. There is no rule as to how such a synth should be controled so this part is up to you. For example, the frequency and the gain of each oscillator could be controlled by independent sliders. Another approach would be to have higher level parameters that control several oscillators at the same time.

When you make this synth, think of it as a musical instrument (and of yourself as a luthier). Try different mappings and explore the "sonic capabilities" of your instrument to create different sound textures. Make it easy to play for a potential performer. Try to use clean coding standards (e.g. when declaring several oscillators, create an array: don't do this: Sine sine1, sine2, etc.;).

Optionally, you could try to see how to generate different notes with your synth and automate that process using a random number generator for example. That's what is called algorithmic music. In that case, some of the parameters offered to the user could be the speed at which new notes are generated, their range, etc. Once again, this is totally up to you: just make it musical and make it sound good!

Tips

• Adding several sine waves together will very likely create an output signal out of range (1+1 = 2, yes :) ), so you might have to scale it depending the number of oscillators you decide to use. Remember that the range of the signal that you send to the DAC should be constrained between -1 and 1. On the other hand, you might like the generated sound, so may be you want to make it a feature (I wouldn't ;) )! In that case, keep it but mention it somewhere in your code.
• Your laptop is powerful enough to compute more than 1000 sine waves in real time but it doesn't mean that you should do it :). 4 finely tuned oscillators will very likely sound better than 100 oscillators used in a bad way.
• An interesting feature could be to let the user choose the number of oscillators (which would imply using dynamic memory allocation, of course ;) ).

Final Deliverable

• Package your project and make it available on GitHub (or any other platform you're used to: BitBucket, SourceForge, CCRMA GitLab, etc.).
• Make sure that your code is reasonably well commented.
• Write a quick description/documentation in a README that you will put at the root of the project.
• Make a short demo video of your instrument (<1 minute) featuring a small "composition" and post it on YouTube (or somewhere else).
• Send the link of your project and video to Romain and Tim.