Is Vital A True Synth Or a Glorified Sample Playback Unit?

Questions and Support
#52

That seems the catch or part of it; the model-- sines, wavetables, complex waveforms and/or physical models, etc.-- as determining the approaches and results/the ‘sound/character’, maybe flexibility. As an aside, I had been somewhat recently looking into Impulse Responses (IR), 3D sound and panning and even the idea, inspired by my knowledge of 3D, of ‘ray-tracing’ an artificial environment for some kind of IR and speaking of physical modeling. If you can import a free Blender model of a cityscape or kitchen, you have an IR right there. Maybe the audio gets ‘raytraced’ as though it were a ray/wave/photon of light.

I will mention the Syrum 2’s new ‘spectral’ oscillator. I’m unsure how that might compare and contrast to ‘additive’ (easier, for one, on the CPU?), but I guess that can be part of the discussion and research. (Can the spectrum move like a landscape/waterscape or video, and morph into others? Scanline shapes/movements?) Anyone try the new Syrum 2? I know that some have been bugged by Vital’s dev-cycle, so there it is, FWIW.

Might be interesting if the idea of additive and physical modeling somehow merged. Even genetic algos as applied, say, to waveform evolution over time. A ‘biosynth’. Synplant might be a bit like that perhaps, but unsure how it compares to my idea of something more automated, realtime and real genetic (‘sexual’/multigenerational waveforms over realtime). There is or was a free synth called, Trilobite, for example, although it looked non-realtime and tedious and escaped my interest at the time.

Sticky-note to self: Maybe mention the case of the video synthesizer as applied to audio/‘moving-terrain’ synthesis (non-static/evolving ‘wavetables’/‘scenes’/events, adding ‘wind’ and ‘rain’, etc., parameters, etc.).

#54

But but but… sound isn’t electromagnetic?

#55

I think one or more of the links referenced include (sine) waves through mediums, like air, water and even the earth’s crust (earthquakes).
At the same time, it may be worth mentioning that Vital is designed to run on and output via electromagnetic devices-- computer and speaker-- the latter one that of course outputs to the medium.
But I mean, if you have a better argument/case than one-liners, unsupported declarations, cherrypicks or gaslights, please feel free and we can take a look.
Of course you’re also free to believe whatever you want. People certainly do. There’s religion and ‘Flat-Earthers’ afterall.
If Syrum can get a spectral oscillator, perhaps one day, Vital or Vitalium can get an additive oscillator, if it doesn’t already sort of have one and it might make sense to.

“Seismic waves produced from earthquakes contain sine waves of many different frequencies.” ~ U.S. Geological Survey

“But but but… Gotta admit my technical knowledge doesn’t stretch to this, if someone is able to shed light on the subject I’d surely be interested in reading it.” ~ HermanVonElsewhere (modded)

<3

#56

Hmh. You posted a number of links to internet discussions that are inconclusive or even contradict what you claimed, without doing any synthesis yourself. That could be called flooding. Bad habit in discussions. Please note you cherry picked quotes from those yourself. I replied with cherry picked quotes from those that contradict your claim.

Then you posted quotes from internet discussion about electromagnetic radiation that’s irrelevant because they don’t discuss sound.

You’re claiming that all sound is sine waves in nature. Whatever mathematical tricks we do to cyclic waveforms don’t really tell anything about what sound really is. FT is a tool for analysis. I haven’t seen anything that concludes your remark.

We can define sound in multiple ways. It’s not really anything but vibrations that living beings hear. Sound is a psychological phenomenon. Without a being that experiences the sound it’s just vibrations propagating through a medium. The time domain of the sound dictates the experience.

E. I’m not saying that if nobody hears a tree falling it doesn’t make a sound. I’m saying that no living beings had a biological ability to translate the vibrations in air to a subjective experience we would not have a concept of sound to begin with. Thus, sound is a subjective experience.

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#57

physical modeling is like a set of idiomatic techniques that you can use, you just need to learn them. check out Eric Bowman.

Synthesis is like drawing with a pencil on paper. and it’s up to how much you want to practice. everyone starts out with the same pencil and paper, you just need to sketch and shade and erase your way to whatever image it is that you “want” to draw. key word is “want”. and just because you “want” the picture to be a certain way doesn’t mean that other people “want” to look at it. so the key is to figure out what it is that you “want”.

also, if you don’t use a filter and you are using 3 oscillators then you are using additive synthesis, especially if you go in and edit the harmonics. the subtractive part of synthesis is just adding a filter that takes stuff away.

spectral synthesis sounds like some kind of FFT paintery. which is fine. if serum is doing that, then it probably is dope.

convolution creates added latency to your synth. you typically do not want any latency in your virtual instrument itself.

if you want to mess around with lots of fancy synthesis, revisit XOXOS old stuff. it’s just a bit buggy and cpu hungry.

but overall, just study Eric Bowman’s vital patches. Trust me, vital is a synth. but really your brain is the most important synth. you are solely responsible for synthesizing the thoughts you are going to think with your brain, and create the commands for your hands. Just take it easy, take a deep breath and keep on going. Even better than engaging here in chat is to ask a competent A.I. like Perplexity all these questions. don’t give leading questions, just ask ask ask all the crazy questions you can, and it can help you a lot better than we can.

You can even get AI to help you write a synthesizer of your dreams in code and after a few months probably get a vsti.

also, the field of math and where it intersects with engineering is a super complex thing and will keep anyone busy for more than a lifetime. so don’t expect to know it all ever.

edit: here’s a physical modeling synth

#58

“No, all waves in nature aren’t sine waves. Quite the contrary…” ~ HermanVonElsewhere

“But but but… sound isn’t electromagnetic?” ~ HermanVonElsewhere

Make up your mind, Herm.

All waves in nature? Sound only?

The rest of your comment is essentially just self-referenced declarations without external support.

#59

I am aware of that synth, rek, and even though I have Plasmonic, Atoms and Chromaphone, I have been meaning to look into it as it still looks interesting in part because it seems a little different and is also FLOSS. If recalled, it is ‘waveguide’, too, whatever that means exactly. Have you tried it? If so, how is it?

About AI, I have been wanting to create my own synth with it, but it still seems a few months, maybe years, away. It also still can’t seem to convert a site design from its internal code (React?) to a Wordpress site, all nice and compressed into a zip file that I can then upload to my site.

“Physical modeling synthesizers do not directly generate sine waves in the traditional sense, but they can simulate sounds that are composed of sine waves. These synthesizers use mathematical models to replicate the behavior of real-world instruments, which often involve complex interactions of multiple sine wave components. For example, physical modeling can simulate the vibrations of strings, membranes, or air columns, which naturally produce sounds that are made up of multiple sine waves.” ~ Perfect Cicuit

“Digital waveguide synthesis is the synthesis of audio using a digital waveguide. Digital waveguides are efficient computational models for physical media through which acoustic waves propagate. For this reason, digital waveguides constitute a major part of most modern physical modeling synthesizers.” ~ Wikipedia

#60

“Sinusoidal waves (or sine waves for short) have turned out to be essential to understanding how our world works.”

Trigonometry in Nature

Sinusoidal Waves as Sound

We’ve studied the graph of y=A Sin(w x) in some detail in class. You might wonder, “Why do we care? Does this ever show up in real life?” The answer is most definitely yes. Sinusoidal waves (or sine waves for short) have turned out to be essential to understanding how our world works…

Of course, when you listen to your stereo you hear more than one note at a time. How does that work? Simple: just take the sine functions for all of the notes and add them together. I’ve done that here with the notes A, C#, and E. (If you have any experience as a musician, you’ll recognize that we’re forming a major chord here.)


Play the chord

There are some interesting things about this picture. First of all, the graph is no longer a sine curve, but there’s definitely a pattern to it. Moreoever, the pattern repeats, so this is still a periodic function.

Whenever you see an “oscilloscope,” for example when you play music using certain programs on a computer, you’re really seeing a whole bunch of sine waves added together. Who knew?

Cancelling Sounds

You may have seen advertisements for “noise reducing” headphones. (If not, you can see a description of one here.) Here’s a rough idea of how they work. First they figure out what kind of noise is reaching your ears. Essentially this means it does “curve fitting” like we did in class; it figures out the sine waves of the ambient sounds. Then it creates additional noise whose sine waves cancel out the ambient sounds. It’s strange, but true: you add together the original noises and new noises, and it all just seems to disappear!

“No, all waves in nature aren’t sine waves. Quite the contrary… …a violin string vibrates in a pattern close to a saw wave. Nature is messy.” ~ HermanVonElsewhere

Sawtooth wave

“…a sawtooth wave’s sound is harsh and clear and its spectrum contains both even and odd harmonics of the fundamental frequency. Because it contains all the integer harmonics, it is one of the best waveforms to use for subtractive synthesis of musical sounds, particularly bowed string instruments like violins and cellos, since the slip-stick behavior of the bow drives the strings with a sawtooth-like motion.” ~ Wikipedia

Harmonic

“In physics, acoustics, and telecommunications, a harmonic is a sinusoidal wave with a frequency that is a positive integer multiple of the fundamental frequency of a periodic signal.” ~ Wikipedia

#61

Come on, that’s childish. Like you wouldn’t understand that the context is sound here, this is a synth forum. And if all sound waves aren’t then all waves aren’t. It makes zero sense to talk about seismic waves here, but you do you ofc.

I think I’m done with your cockiness and flood of random quotes about elemental theory without any synthesis and interpretation.

1 Like
#62

i need some sleep

2 Likes
#63

It’s a wavetable synthesiser

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#64

A fancy rompler. :wink:

“Wavetable synthesis is basically a kind of ‘cheat code’ version of additive synthesis. Instead of having to design complex waveforms, you can just sample an existing one that’s pretty good, and loop it, mixing it with other waveforms to create more complex or evolving sounds.”

"Come on, that’s childish. Like you wouldn’t understand that the context is sound here, this is a synth forum. And if all sound waves aren’t then all waves aren’t. It makes zero sense to talk about seismic waves here, but you do you ofc.

I think I’m done with your cockiness and flood of random quotes about elemental theory without any synthesis and interpretation." ~ HermanVonElsewhere

“I hate being schooled and called-out for my but-pulls (‘but but but…’) so, and wearing my pontiff hat, I’ll now take my overdue waddle out the exit-door…” ~ HermanVonElsewhere (‘translated’, or ‘synthesized’)

#65

Copy of recent email, for your interest:

"Hi Tuğrul…

Understood and fair enough with regard to your consideration…

Have you ever heard of Terrain synth, by the way? Here is a video about it:

https://youtu.be/xtvo_RxdEsY?si=HTHEh0OYNzxtdbmv

I tested it briefly some months ago, but don’t think the terrain moved [dynamically] under the scan-line like in the video and/or if I just missed its menu-button or it was a future feature or something…

3D animation like in Blender3D has of course been around for some time and I wonder how easy or difficult and/or process/memory-taxing it might be to implement, in the realtime audio-synthesis realm, some kinds of chaotic (math-functions) wave surfaces that may already exist in the 3D animation and scientific visualizations realms…

And then there may be genetic/mutation-algorithm biological realms too that could be applied to wave evolution in the synthesizer realm.

I know we can get flat images to ‘push’ 3D vertices one way or another to get depth in the 3 axes-- I’ve done it myself-- which is in part why I mentioned moving images (to push/shift the sines/harmonics).

Syrum, incidentally, just arrived in a new version 2 that has some kind of new spectral feature/‘oscillator’, though I’m unsure how flexible it is, what its results are and/or how it applies to ‘the real world’, such as vis-a-vis sine wave propagation[/interaction].

But yes importing a moving video image-- a ‘moving wavetable’-- and/or a dynamic mathematical surface-map (fractals, ‘chaos’, etc.) would seem to increase RAM/CPU/GPU demands… although I noticed that the aforementioned Terrain synth seems to use simple, if moving, ‘phong-shaded’ 3D math-/wave-maps for the (shape-selectible) ‘scan-lines’ to scan.

Additional associated reference:
https://lumen-app.com/
"

#66

#67

Maybe they should have argued online about synths instead.

Seriously, though, and since you mentioned AI above, I’ll add to my above stuff, recent developments WRT realtime AI gaming and suggest thinking, if so desired of course, about that as applied to synthesis. If AI can generate on-the-fly immersive worlds to interact with, perhaps it can also be used to make music and sound-/instrument-design.

Then again, a lot of this stuff might cause some to attempt bailing from this system, what I call the crony-capitalist plutarchy-- call it what you will. Myself, I’ve been slowly doing so over the years and even took up gardening and bought an electric acoustic guitar on a whim and a 50%-off sale from a music shop that, although I didn’t know it at the time, was going out of business.

That’s real strings, or so they say…

"Animals don t do what humans do via speech, namely, make a symbol stand in for the thing. As Tim Ingold puts it, ‘they do not impose a conceptual grid on the flow of experience and hence do not encode that experience in symbolic forms.’ " ~ John Zerzan

“…The map is a simulacrum that, as a model, loses all reference to reality… reality exists only as rotting shreds that are attached to the map, and this is the state of our age according to Baudrillard; that the model, itself, has primacy for us; the real has become irrelevant…” ~ Frances Flannery-Dailey

#68

New Hypothetical Goldwaterdance Additive-Physical-Modeling Synth Plugin

Just found this today:

“The plugin offers a collection of 24 synthesis engines packed in a sleek, retro-futuristic interface. By the way, this isn’t the first time Flechtwerk has seen the light of day. There’s been a Max for Live version floating around for a while, but this marks the first official plugin release across all major platforms.”

Plaits has been incorporated here and there, being FLOSS, including in PlugData, but it’s nice to see it as a ‘regular’ plugin, and free and FLOSS no less, apparently…

…24 synthesis engines, ay? I wonder if it has wavetable. Before I open it, I’ll put my ear to the box, shake it and see if I can hear anything.

‘Can you import your own wavetables? I sure hope so, dammit!’

XD

…The new version of Vital-- or maybe an entirely new synth altogether-- might have two (minimum) overlapped (layers) moving images (that we can also import) that each get converted (‘displacement maps’) to x-y axes for the waves/partials/harmonics that then interact (like waves do in real life!) with the different image-to-sine-wave/model-layers that we can then blend, filter, adjust, etc., using different algos (buttons/dials/sliders, maybe a modeled ‘hand’ stirring the ‘water’/‘medium’) as per how waves interact in nature and as per how they ‘don’t’, to take it to a whole nuther level! Game-changer!..

…‘What’s the holdup, Matt?! Where is he?! I saw him at Discord! But that was 6 whole months ago! How can he do this to us!? Ghost us like this!?’

=D

1 Like
Dynamic 'WaveCubes/WaveMaps'
#69

‘I wanna extra oscillator!’ :wink:

See also Feature Request section.

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#70

Yeah that would be gr8 - more over a 2nd page of oscillators with connecting possibilities ! And of course new osc engines :smiley:

#71

I initially put that as a bit of sarcasm, but then considered Serum’s new spectral(?) oscillator.

I also added some elaboration to my feature-request.

1 Like
#72

See also.