A Brief Guide To How Additive Synthesis Works

In this video, composer Benn Jordan gives a short introduction to additive synthesis.

Along the way, Jordan demonstrates how sine waves can be stacked to create basic timbres, how you can manually recreate a timbre using additive synthesis and why you might not want to use additive synthesis to create music for dogs.

Stick around to the end for an example of why you might want to use additive synthesis to recreate acoustic instruments, instead of using samples.

7 thoughts on “A Brief Guide To How Additive Synthesis Works

    1. You can slow down the playback speed on YouTube videos. 75% speed will make him sound a bit stoned, but perhaps easier for you to follow.

  1. He should have noted that his resynthesized melodica was missing some higher partials that were present in the sample. It was very noticeable.

  2. If I had a machine with deep learning capabilities available, then I think I would teach it to use FM synthesis rather than additive synthesis.

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