Wolfgang Palm Wants To Blow Your Mind With His New Sine+Noise Modeling Synth!

It looks like Wolfgang Palm – one of the fathers of digital synthesis – wants to blow your mind with his new synthesizer!

He responded to our post about his upcoming Waldorf wavetable synth for the iPad with a link to some information on his site about Sine + Noise modeling, an approach to synthesis he has explored with recent research.

Here’s what he has to say:

“Sine+Noise modelling is an analysis/synthesis technique, where an audio signal is decomposed into sine waves plus an additional noise signal.

I started developing such a system in 2003, and refined it over the years. It is now sold to Waldorf. The release is planned later this year.

The advantages of Sine+Noise modelling:

  • all audio signals can be resynthesized
  • each partial sine wave can be edited individually in its loudness contour
  • time/pitch manipulation in a wide range
  • morphing of totally different sounds possible
  • arbitrary filtering in the frequency domain

My Synthesizer features 3D displays, which allow easy editing of the audio components directly.”


This video looks at sound editing in a spectral synthesizer, using Wolfgang Palm’s Sine+Noise modeling synth.

Note that this is not from a final app, so things could change!

3 thoughts on “Wolfgang Palm Wants To Blow Your Mind With His New Sine+Noise Modeling Synth!

  1. isn’t this what you can do with FFT: decompose the sound in sinewaves (fundamental, harmonics, partials) and then resynthetize it. And since you have all the elements separately you can modify the sound as you like.
    On a certain level this can be easily done with applications like Spear.
    It’s like additive synthesis but starting from some real sounds. But I guess Palm will have added quite some set of features to make this unique! Looking forward to trying it out

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *