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NEC
On 2014-10-16 07:08:04 +0000, Lostgallifreyan said:
Oregonian Haruspex wrote in : Writing software is generally one of the most frightfully boring tasks that one can possibly do. True, but the payoff is amazing at times. I'm coding a phase modulation synthesiser based on Yamaha's DX7, with months full on, then slightly less months full-off, as the only way to get free of it, and to come back at it and see it as another person would, because I work entirely alone. Now, it si tough, for sure, never mind 'Doctor's hours', try 'Edison's hours', sometimes missing out whole days and nights of rest to see somethign through. Nothing has ever imposed discipline on me like my want to make this happen, I taught myself more than a childhood of schooling, by magnitudes, not multiples. Now, the payoff... WHen I got past basic principles of audio and MIDI on a PC, logarithms and bitshifts and lookup tables foe speed, etc, designed my own realtime interpolator for MIDI data and got the pitch control engine taking linear signals for log domain calculations, the response of pitch over ten octaves is swift and clean, NO digital zipper noise whatsoever despite a mere 7 bits avalaible to direct the sweep, regardless of speed. MIDI is usually scorned for failure to acheive this, but I did it, and you'd be hard pressed to find a commercially available synthesier that can do this. I have a good 'analog' simulation, and a realtime variable non-linear compression and expansion method capable of extremely realisting imitations of horn and string sounds. This instrument has polyphony and multitimbrality enough to allow composition for a small symphony orchestra. It's too off-topic for me to go on here any further, but I hope this is enough to convey the reality: that writing software, while almost insufferably tedious at times, can lead to long moments of exhilaration like orbital flight, it feels like achieving the building of a space shuttle in a back yard. To be able to play a moderately realistic piano, knowing that every part of its existence except the host machine and the coding language used, is beyond parallel, at least for me. I think if Bach or Beethoven had been sent a time machine with a message to the effect that they could have had this, they'd have got in and things might have been very diferent for music. On the other hand, it is because of what they did do that this is possible at all... I appreciate the sentiment and I have in fact been excited about writing software. I am enjoying myself tremendously now, though with Mathematica the goal isn't exactly to create self-contained applications, but is more akin with exploration. I am an amateur musician myself and I really enjoy tinkering with MIDI. To my ear the zipper noise as you change envelopes and whatnot is quite synth-dependent. Anyway good luck and have fun! |
#2
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NEC
Oregonian Haruspex wrote in
: To my ear the zipper noise as you change envelopes and whatnot is quite synth-dependent. True, some are ok with it. Kurzweil for example. There's usually a payoff though, a sluggishness in response that can be treacly or even intolerable if wanting the kind of response to glide a violinist wants. Mine's not perfect either, but I got a better compromise than anything I'd heard in anything I'd owned since 1983 when I first got one. (DX7). I just tried to eliminate every vice that ever irked me in an instrument, note stealing in voice allocation, for example... it has to happen, but making it sound less conspicuous turned out to be a demanding puzzle to solve efficiently. Likewise the non-linear slopes in just about everything, that is at the core of why a DX7 is inherently 'natural' when so many others are not. That is fun though, very interesting discoveries there.. |
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