Application to FM Synthesis

The properties of the new oscillator appear well suited for FM applications in VLSI because of the minimized computational expense. However, in this application there are issues to be resolved regarding conversion from modulator output to carrier coefficients. Preliminary experiments indicate that FM indices less than $1$ are well behaved when the output of a modulating oscillator simply adds to the coefficient of the carrier oscillator (bypassing the exact FM formulas). Approximate amplitude normalizing coefficients have also been derived which provide a first-order approximation to the exact AM compensation at low cost. For music synthesis applications, we believe a distortion in the details of the FM instantaneous frequency trajectory and a moderate amount of incidental AM can be tolerated since they produce only second-order timbral effects in many situations.