EMUSIC-L Digest Volume 57, Issue 18 This issue's topics: sampling synthesizers question... (synclaver, etc...) (5 messages) Score reading? text to midi file format program text to midi file format program N (2 messages) Your EMUSIC-L Digest moderator is Joe McMahon . You may subscribe to EMUSIC-L by sending mail to listserv@american.edu with the line "SUB EMUSIC-L your name" as the text. The EMUSIC-L archive is a service of SunSite (sunsite.unc.edu) at the University of North Carolina. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1993 08:40:29 GMT From: Thomas S Wilson Subject: sampling synthesizers question... (synclaver, etc...) I have seen the Synclavier's 3-D wave ford display on some of Laurie Anderson's album covers. This really intrigues me because I work with Iris 4000's and they do 3-D graphics really well.... They also do sound VERY well... most people don't know this, but a Iris can sample at 48kHz and take direct digital in and record 4-tracks at a time. Pretty cool. I was wondering... do sampling synthesizers ( not like a Roland piano module or E-mu proteus/1/2/etc where they sample at every note ) like the Synclavier... I guess the wave station does this kind of stuff too... Do they analyze the frequency/time/amplitude relation, and just recreate this over different frequencies? For example... take a sample of a flute, figure out that it's say... 440hz, 880hz and a few other harmonics here and there that make an instrument sound like it does and when an A is played, play that note, when a B is played, transpose the frequency real-time, or what? I am not familiar with the capabilities of many of todays specific synthesizers, but I know that the Indogo's and the Onyx's and a supercomputer here or there would be able to make for some decent sampling.... -- ||| Scott Wilson ||| "Paradise is exactly like where ||| . . wilson@ee.msstate.edu . . you are right now, only much, . . _ "office": (601)325-2220 _ MUCH better -Laurie Anderson _ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1993 09:17:27 +1300 From: Alastair Thomson Subject: Re: sampling synthesizers question... (synclaver, etc...) Hi there, As far as I have seen, there are basically three ways currently used to produce 'sampled' instrument sounds. 1. Multisound sampling - An instrument is sampled at each note. Both the samples and their envelope shape are noted. When a note is played on the keyboard the synth looks up the appropriate note and replays it. 2. Single sound sampling - An instrument or sound is sampled playing one note. When the sound is played, it pitch shifts the sample, and adds an envelope to it. This is what is generally done by the demos I have seen on SGI equipment. 3. What Korg calls DWGS. A sampled sound is broken down into its component harmonics, and the replayed as a set of sine waves at appropriate levels. This is generally used where the sound is too long to be held as single samples, for example the pipe organ sound on a Korg M1 is generated this way because the duration of a note may be very long. Any of the SGI machines that have CD quality sound - 4D series, Indigo, Indy, Onyx. are capable of any of these methods of synthesis. You just need a program to do it, and a MIDI adapter for the SGI. I do a similar thing with my NeXT. Alastair -- Alastair Thomson, | Phone +64-3-479-8347 Black Albatross Chief Programmer, | Fax +64-3-479-8529 Department of Computer Science, | University of Otago, | alastair@farli.otago.ac.nz Dunedin, New Zealand | NeXTmail Welcome "Any sex that lands you in hell, can't be safe sex" ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1993 20:46:06 -0700 From: Chris Bingham Subject: Re: sampling synthesizers question... (synclaver, etc...) tsw1@Ra.MsState.Edu (Thomas S Wilson) writes: >I was wondering... do sampling synthesizers ( not like a Roland piano >module or E-mu proteus/1/2/etc where they sample at every note ) like >the Synclavier... I guess the wave station does this kind of stuff too... >Do they analyze the frequency/time/amplitude relation, and just recreate >this over different frequencies? >For example... take a sample of a flute, figure out that it's say... 440hz, >880hz and a few other harmonics here and there that make an instrument sound >like it does and when an A is played, play that note, when a B is played, >transpose the frequency real-time, or what? The Proteus modules and almost all other sample-based keyboards (Synclavier included) do not typically sample at every note: it would take up way too much memory & disk space. Rather, they sample a few notes at a few velocities and use some sort of crossfade or interpolation scheme to get smooth transitions from low to high and soft to loud. The Synclavier's 3D wave plot was indeed a frequency/amplitude/time graph, but the analysis was done for graphing a single sample only; it wasn't nearly fast enough for real-time manipulation. Does anyone know of any commercial products that CAN successfully sample, analyze, and resynthesize in real-time? There was the Axcel, a product that was advertised with great fanfare in Keyboard but never materialized. I saw a demonstration of a development version, which was fairly impressive. As I recall, it used custom parallel- processing hardware to do the Fourier analysis and resynthesis, and was capable of adjusting the pitch of a sound without affecting the duration, for example. Chris ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1993 07:21:26 -0500 From: Stephen David Beck Subject: Re: sampling synthesizers question... (synclaver, etc...) Most sampling synthesizers use "sample rate conversion" (i.e., speeding up the record) to raise and lower the sampled pitches. This technique can be very useful within a few semitones, but the technique fails to produce "realistic" sounds beyond that. What sampling rate conversion does not do is account for changes in spectra due to the resonance characteristics of the sampled instrument. Changes in amplitude also affect resonance and hence, spectra. Sampling and sample rate conversion cannot account for these changes and that is why one sample is insufficient for good sample playback. Many newer samplers have filters that help with this problem, but it is not enough. Other techniques which do spectral analysis or physically model instruments are usually not real-time (pvoc, lpc, fof) unless you have a DECstation or like machine, and even then the analysis part is strictly pre-synthesis. -Stephen David Beck -no signature ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1993 10:56:50 GMT From: Bernd Sieker Subject: Re: sampling synthesizers question... (synclaver, etc...) In article <28o69u$oc@apple.com>, bing@apple.com (Chris Bingham) writes: |> [...] Does anyone know of any commercial products |> that CAN successfully sample, analyze, and resynthesize in real-time? |> There was the Axcel, a product that was advertised with great fanfare in |> Keyboard but never materialized. I saw a demonstration of a development |> version, which was fairly impressive. As I recall, it used custom parallel- |> processing hardware to do the Fourier analysis and resynthesis, and was capable |> of adjusting the pitch of a sound without affecting the duration, for example. As far as I know, most larger companies are doing some research in that direction, but there is no real "re-synthesizer" so far. However, with the growing number crunching capabilities of the digital signal processors, a high quality real-time FFT (fast fourier transformation), enabling very easy high quality real time pitch shift should be possible in the near future. Another way to adjust the pitch of a note without changing the duration is to use a pitch shifter, which uses a different way to do this. They use a sawtooth wave to modulate the original wave. Thus transposing down can be done quite easily by just playing a few wavecycles a little slower than original and then omitting one. This is always a few wavecycles behind the original note, but an FFT resynth would probably not be faster. If this "modulation" is done very good (i. e. skipping a cycle at zero-crossings only and randomly modulating the time between omitted cycles) the high class pitch shifters can shift nearly an octave without losing too much of the original character of the note. To help preserving the original character as much as possible they sometimes use filters, too. I don't know exactly how transposing up is done, since here a few wavecycles would need to be repeated. |> |> Chris Bernd -- _ Real Life Bernd Sieker, Universitaet Bielefeld only // IRC Pink Amiga__// HAM Radio DG 6 YHI \X/ email bsieker@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de -------------------------------------- Minister, minister, care for your children, order them not into damnation to eliminate those who would trespass against you. (Fish, Forgotten Sons) ============ Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1993 23:58:55 -0500 Reply-To: Electronic Music Discussion List Sender: Electronic Music Discussion List From: Mark Swann Subject: im shopping. im going mad. yes,, its really difficult to get info out of salespeople sometimes. however,, I think I found a way to get sampling and a good workstation plus hard diskrecording for a decent price... does this sound feasible anybody: turtle beaches new digital 44mhz HD recording card for the pC (400$)(2 tracks),,,,plus a keyboard that has plenty of ram and a disk drive... -- what I am wondering is: could you record a voice onto hard drive via the turtle card, then,, from the HD go into your ram on your ensonicTS10 or KorgX3(or similar KB),, and then put that voice on the disk drive in the KB.... this would be for rather short 'sound byte' vocal manipulations, not a whole vocal for a song. -- thx for any input,, going to look at the akai stuff tomorrow. svann ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1993 18:07:43 GMT From: "Levi R. Lustman" Subject: Score reading? I am trying to set up a program which will read a score and play it on Soundblaster. I have SB-Pro, with a 486 50MHz machine. I do not have a MIDI or the ability to play anything on a keyboard. I am not interested in sampled sound, but rather in something like: violin MM 120 again: c5 3/8 d e f count=count+1 if count=1 then again resulting in: some channel is set to violin waveform ( an approximation, whatever) MM sets the right duration: 1 quarter = 1/2 sec then that channel plays c d e f in the fifth octave, each lasting 3/8 , i.e. .75 sec TWICE because of the check and goto on the variable count which , as variables should , is preset to zero In particular, I would hate to compile the lines above to a series of real time events, in which the notes actually appear twice -- unless there is no choice. Even messier is compilation of several voices as real time events; I would rather use the CPU timer to send messages to the various channels at the right times. Basically, I need to know how to a. set up an "instrument" ( is this the same as a channel?) in real time. I think th SB FM would be more than sufficient. b. start and stop a given sound (e.g. c5) on that channel in real time The rest of the software is more or less ready in reasonable C. I can use this kind of scores on a Macintosh, using the built-in 4 voice speaker, which sounds disgusting to horrible. But, if anyone is interested, this is a Lightspeed Pascal (yecch) program, completely portable and available for asking with some scores. I have been reading the SB books and what I could gather about SB and MIDI from various archives ( we don't get news ). I think I understand something about .cmf files, although I cannot yet write one. But I am in the dark about point b. above ( probably also about a. ) so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Levi ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1993 13:31:34 CET From: Jack Latanowicz Subject: Re: text to midi file format program On Tue, 19 Oct 1993 16:22:46 BST Gabriel Landini said: >Hi, I remember some time ago somebody talked about a program which reads >text from a file and outputs to midi file format. > >Does anybody know where is that prog. available? > >Thanks, > >Gabriel G.Landini@bham.ac.uk Hay ! :-) You didn't say to what computer. (maybe you want source code) There is a proggy for amiga called 'Midi Playgroung' that I got from FTP site... I can't quite remember from where exactly. It works as a command and you can dump banks into computer and record as binary also input text and sent it out to MIDI. It has three write/read options MIDI, BINARY, TEXT. Jack L. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jack Latanowicz tel/fax Pl-(0-61) 798-202 Ul.Porzeczkowa 27 Jack@plpuam11.bitnet 61-306 Poznan P O L A N D "exploring life is the sense of living..." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1993 12:56:49 BST From: "Steven D. Bramson" Subject: Re: text to midi file format program N Gabriel G.Landini@bham.ac.uk says: Hi, I remember some time ago somebody talked about a program which reads text from a file and outputs to midi file format. Does anybody know where is that prog. available? ------------------------------------ You can pick up MF2T.ZIP (which does MIDI to text and vice-versa) from ftp.cs.ruu.nl which also has lots of MIDI files and other goodies. Steven D Bramson Data Management Group JET Joint Undertaking Abingdon Oxfordshire OX14 3EA United Kingdom E-mail sdb@jet.uk Voice 0235 465 013 Fax 0235 465 399 ------------------------------------------------------------------ JET is Europe's fusion research project Disclaimer: Any views expressed are mine and do not represent those of JET ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1993 17:26:11 +0100 From: Adam MIROWSKI Subject: Re: text to midi file format program N > Gabriel G.Landini@bham.ac.uk says: > > Hi, I remember some time ago somebody talked about a program which reads > text from a file and outputs to midi file format. > > ------------------------------------ > You can pick up MF2T.ZIP (which does MIDI to text and vice-versa) from > ftp.cs.ruu.nl which also has lots of MIDI files and other goodies. > ------------------------------------------------------------------ I developped one in my spare time, to... not lose contact with complation techniques. It uses a kind of funky structured troff-like format. Here is an example score. ;---------------------- .# "gs-snd.inc" ; GS definitions .# "gs-utils.inc" ; GS subroutines .RX 96 ; Set the quarter note resolution .TS "My GS track" .FN "GS_reset" ; Function call: issue a GS-reset sysex ;--- Play a rythm pattern .CH $DrumChan ; Set channel .PR $RoomSet ; Select instrument .{ ; This is the bass-drum "thread" ~$BD(96) S48 * *96 S .| ; This is the snare-drum "thread" S96 ~$SD S * .} .BE ; Check we are at bar end ;---- Play "When the saints" S96 C E F .BE G(4*96):127 ; Modify length and add sforzato .BE S96 C E F .BE G(4*96):127 .BE S96 C E F .BE G(2*96) E C E D(4*96) S96 E E D C(3*96) C E(2*96) G G96 F F(4*96) S96 C E G(2*96) E C D C(5*96) ;---- Play some chords .CH 0 ; Change to a melodic channel C+Eb+G+ ; Issue a minor C chord % ; Re-issue chord @Cm+ ; Issue same chord using a different syntax @Cm7b9-5{-1} ; Another chord, inverted ;--- Now replay with arpeggio .CD 3 % ; Replay last chord ;--- Perform C-like calculations and print result .PT "The cube of 225 is ", (225 * 225 * 225) $result = ((12*24) / 48 - 3 ? 100 : -102) .PT "The $result is ", $result ;--- A simple loop $count = 10 .LA 1 .PT "Entering ", $count, "nth loop" .TT (--$count) ; Evaluate exit condition .SK 1 ; Conditional skip .TE .TS "Another track" ; ... .TE ;----------------------- There are lots of other "calls" and constructs, for example for transcribing sheet music containing things like "D.C." or "coda", repetition signs, etc. You can also construct "performances", playing a virtual instrument on several channels at once, with different velocities. Program Changes (.PR) automatically issue Bank Select messages depending on the mode. I was also thinking about explicit (.CH) or implicit ('channel) Channel Change messages automatically inserting appropriate Port Change meta-messages. The compiler is named MCOMP. It converts the above text into a midifile, which can be played with a midifile player. I have also a decomposer/decompiler which produces MCOMP scores (.MCO extension under MS-DOS) from MIDI, CMF, ROL and Music Studio files. The decomposer is able to intelligently remap ROL files into General MIDI midifiles. -- Adam Mirowski, mir@chorus.fr (FRANCE), tel. +33 (1) 30-64-82-00 or 74 Chorus systemes, 6, av.Gustave Eiffel, 78182 Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines CEDEX ------------------------------ End of the EMUSIC-L Digest ******************************