As a potentially-serendipitous followup to my previous main post, perhaps this is telling me why I find wavetable synths I’ve tried and listened to somehow static, flat or lacking in some sort of vitality:
Wat? That guy in the video actually introduced a parameter called “maenderance” because he thinks the sound is to static…
Have you ever explored the different capabilities of Vital, or do you only skim through the factory presets of the free version only? There’s so many ways you can modulate stuff that using the term “static” makes you look stupid.
Another question is - what is the practical use in music? A actual piano is never doing any sort of terrain synthesize, yet it’s one of the prominent instruments throughout music in history and today. Don’t get me wrong. I’m attracted by the visuals of this terrain thingy as well. It’s the same with oscilloscope music by the way…
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The piano supports the point I made in my previous main point I referenced, though. I suggest that the piano has a ‘fluid terrain’ that is its entire acoustic context, such as WRT its body and its environment. In fact, there’s a lot of feedback, a lot of interplay going on as well.
Also it’s not just the ‘meanderance’ in the Terrain synth, but the terrain can also be animated apparently. Do Vital’s entire wavetables move like a terrain, or perhaps more accurately, a body of fluid, or perhaps even more accutrately, an artificial dynamic fluid that doesn’t exist in reality and somehow transcends it?
Now that I write this, as further development of Terrain-- and I might tell the dev myself about this-- it might be relatively trivial to impement an environment (since it’s more or less already there) that allows for impulse responses and animated 3D sound and whatnot, maybe even by end-user design.
I have yet to try either in any significant capacity, so I don’t know, but I’m sure each has many things to offer and who knows, Matt might even decide to 3D-ify Vital and maybe even plug an AI into it, like that text thing it already has, to help us craft some of our sounds ‘outside’ so that we have less to do ‘inside’…
Unsure where all this leads, but it’s the trip that can be half the fun.
Oh, by the way, I’m fine with asking the kinds of questions and making the kinds of comments that others can be afraid to precisely because they’re afraid to look stupid. LOL
i didn’t hear anything in there that vital can’t do, at first glance, it’s just a different biofeedback system for the eyes and ears. if vital had the same visualizer the ‘terrain’ could look like that if you tweaked the LFOs the same way. nothing against the dev, because a gui can influence how you use a synth.
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As a reminder, first you were writing about true additive synth thing. Where does vitality of sound factor there? I presume one might ask to be able to manipulate each partial on its own but I don’t think any human-usable synth design can do that. The computer can do that, sure, but how does a human being exercise such a fine-grained control? The answe is, unfortunately, that one doesn’t need to control that many parameters to get sound lively by almost everyone’s standards, one just needs to make the synth patch with care and some foreknowledge. Then almost any general-purpose synth should be able to shine, regardless of synthesis capabilities it offers, and even more regardless of its actual implementation of them, if it’s not too shabby.
Happy New Year! Is it June, 2025 already?! My how time flies. So how is everyone? Any new year’s resolutions?
I had to re-read this thread because I kind of forgot what I was on about… I guess part of it was, well, take a physical modeling synth: It has the strings, say, and the body, but what about the environment? Well, I know we have 3D environments now, separately, like for panning and IR’s, and I know that Sumu came out recently and it has some kind of 3D effects on it, but I wonder if an instrument could be approached as not only a quasi-physical model, say, like Plasmonic, but one that has environmental components attached to it, rather than as afterthoughts/aftereffects.
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when i read what you wrote, talking about environment. i cant help but think reverb. and that’s what everyone involved in the making of reverbs is really trying to do, to recreate some kind of space. if you get some new ideas how to do that, by all means go ahead. I’m not trying to be a naysayer, and effects can be so effectful that they get into the territory of synthesis. like comb filters and karplus strong.
~ The Environments-Is/As-The-Instruments ~
You play a grand piano in the bathroom and the whole bathroom and what’s in it vibrate to the notes (which, in turn, make the strings of the piano vibrate and so on) and some notes especially because they are in tune to some kinds of frequencies in the room and so you get those interplays among other interplays. That goes beyond simple reverb and unites the instruments with/within their environments.
Don’t ask us what we think you’re doing playing a grand piano in the bathroom, or whose business it is anyway, just that that’s what you like to do. Maybe your bath is in the kitchen, and sounds great when you hit it with a wooden spoon.
And you like to chop your veggies while taking a bath and have one of those tray thingies that stretch across the bath so you can do so. But I digress.
to get audio feedback you’d need physical modeling which is exciter driven delay lines. and you would need to carefully get audio in from a microphone in order to get your nonlinearities and stuff to get meaningful frequency dependent feedback. so i’d say physical modeling is probably what you’d be looking for, but one that has audio input which is almost non existent, but can be made in puredata for example. you just need to hit the LLM’s or be a math and programming and dsp genius to begin with.
~ Wavetable Obsolescence? ~
What about raytracing code-theft from 3D apps that have been around for forever and optimizations in that regard, even AI optimizations (and/or completely new synths) such that we are especially seeing now with the newer realtime world-interaction stuff? (To take people even further away from the real world.) Rays might as well be waves of sound, yes? Did we already cover this extensively with Herm? 
Dynamic/Realtime interactive virtual worlds might as well be(/include) dynamic/realtime interactive virtual sound, yes?
One might be forgiven in thinking that there’s no excuse anymore for relatively-static wavetable synths and that they may already be obsolete, just that we may not realize it yet. Not that there’s anything wrong with antiques necessarily. I mean Full Bucket virtualized the Korg Poly 800 afterall!
Actually, in a way, it is if the ‘terrain’ is the entire holism of the piano’s sound. Of course it’s not ‘synthetic’ though.
I mean, there is the mallet’s mechanism and the mallet, itself, hitting the string; then the vibrations of the frame that holds all the strings; then the body of the piano; and then the general environment and what’s in it.
It’s a sonic terrain.
Have you ever seen the inside of a piano? Do you think the strings vibrate in isolation to anything else? Before they hit your ears?
Protean Software Synth
(May 2025, experimental, standalone)
“…uses fluid dynamics and relevant particle forces/interactions to render and organize hundreds of sine waves. Designed & developed by Sinan Bokesoy…”
