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.