resynthesis

Torley does his thing with Camel Audio Alchemy, demonstrating some extreme arpeggiator pattern programming. Read more…

This is a demo of the Acxel Resynthesizer acxelisation process.

via erasemusic:

Analysing the vocal intro of the track “bootsequence” by erase, the track plays along whilst acxelisation process takes place and the video ends with the acxelized sound.

SPEAR (Sinusoidal Partial Editing And Resynthesis) version 0.7.1 is a free application for Windows & OS X for audio analysis, editing and synthesis.

The analysis procedure attempts to represent a sound with many individual sinusoidal tracks (partials), each corresponding to a single sinusoidal wave with time varying frequency and amplitude.

Something which closely resembles the original input sound (a resynthesis) can be generated by computing and adding all of the individual time varying sinusoidal waves together. In almost all cases, the resynthesis will not be exactly identical to the original sound (although it is possible to get very close).

Aside from offering a very detailed analysis of the time varying frequency content of a sound, a sinusoidal model offers a great deal of flexibility for editing and manipulation. SPEAR supports flexible selection and immediate manipulation of analysis data, cut and paste, and unlimited undo/redo. Hundreds of simultaneous partials can be synthesized in real-time and documents may contain thousands of individual partials dispersed in time. SPEAR also supports a variety of standard file formats for the import and export of analysis data.

What’s new in this version?

• No expiration date!
• The pencil tool now works! Amplitude is proportional to horizontal velocity: the faster you move to the left or right the higher the amplitude.
• Many small bug fixes and interface improvements for Windows.
• Support for DirectSound and ASIO sound devices on Windows (select in the Preferences window).
• Fade in/out selected partials.
• Improved Windows and Mac installation.

Read more in the ICMC paper “Software for Spectral Analysis, Editing, and Synthesis.” (pdf)

The Technos Acxel Resynthesizer is an additive synth developed in Quebec, Canada during the late 1980s. Its architecture is based on sine-wave oscillators that are each assigned amplitude and pitch envelopes to form the component harmonics of a sound.

The major innovation of the Acxel was, according to Technos, resynthesis. The idea is to sample a sound and extract its harmonic content using the Acxelizer. This information is then used to assign parameters, including envelopes, to the oscillators.

The Acxel comes in two pieces: the Solitary and the Grapher. The Solitary contains the main guts of the machine, including the main CPU board, the oscillator boards, the sampling board, the Acxelizer board, the floppy drive, and the I/O.

The Grapher is the machine’s user interface and is what Technos highlighted in its advertising. It’s a vacuum-fluorescent display for status information and menus and a surface of touch-sensitive nodules, 2114 of which contain LEDs.

Here are some videos that were made at the time to introduce the Technos Acxel Resynthesizer: Read more…