Wolgang Palm Tried To Retire, But He Can’t Stop Innovating (Sneak Preview)

Wolfgang Palm – founder of PPG (Palm Products GmbH), pioneer of digital and hybrid synthesis approaches – announced that he was retiring last year. But he just can’t quit innovating.

Palm announced his retirement earlier this year, but after working 50 years 0n creative sound synthesis tools, it seems he just can’t stop. Today he shared this ‘sound morphing experiment’, described as ‘Total Morph’. The approach explores morphing two distinct sounds together and letting you morph between them.

“‘This is just a test. I cannot say yet whether this will grow into a new product,” notes Palm. “Anyway, I thought it might be interesting.”

Is it time to get Wolfgang Palm out of retirement? Check out the sneak preview video, embedded above, and let us know what you think in the comments!

24 thoughts on “Wolgang Palm Tried To Retire, But He Can’t Stop Innovating (Sneak Preview)

  1. Used to work in a company developing a dynamic hardware additive synthesizer, and morphing a sound into another by slowly adapting the harmonics of a sound to the other one was a big research topic at that time. In reality, unfortunately, although the mechanism is not the same, the end effect is very close to mixing the two sounds by simply fading one while increasing the other.

    1. Very interesting! In fact, that could be useful to test. Do users hear enough of a difference?
      There might be some cases where the effect is more striking. Not hearing that in the demo, but maybe with sounds which are more distinctive based on phasing?

    2. This has been done with the Kyma/Pacarana(Capybara) system for many, many years. When done right, the morphing does not sound like a standard mix. They have many patches (sounds) using their morphing modules but one that really highlights it is a morph between a wolf howl and a church bell. The howl starts to take on the ring of the bell when morphed. I have morphed vocal tracks with many percussive sounds to great effect. That is just in its basic form. The extent of control of morphing and real time adjusting of all of the spectral content is mind-blowing.

  2. Wolfgang , Please return Infinite to Ipad AppStore .
    I will buy “as seen” with no expectation of updates.
    It was always next on my wishlist ,
    pressured into buying other releases on time limited sales instead ,
    I always assumed it would always be there , after all it IS called “Infinite” .
    If you had announced in advance it would disappear I’m sure many more would have bought it .
    Now the void & self kicking is indeed Infinite .

  3. Love it! I heard….n I can see many ways I could use this app In my studio for sounds that I can’t get now from the equipment I have.

    I have all his other Apps n I love them!!

    Bring it on Wolfgang….thank you for not yet retiring!! Sorry if I sound selfish!

  4. Today I was playing with the new OS 2.5 release on my Yamaha modx Synthesizer. It features smart morph. Feels very slmilar to above preview video. Looking forward to learning the additional creative spin a single genius person can add to a big corporations effort.

  5. The things Palm has accomplished are because of his talents and knowledge and also because he has so much drive that even after retirement he still needs to chase the dreams.

    I am sure when I get there I will be doing much more napping.

  6. the OB12 keyboard had this feature – where you could morph between presets in real-time using the mod-wheel… and it worked somewhat

    but regardless of whether it worked the way it was supposed to or not, it often resulted in super bizarre and awesomely weird sounds

    so yeh, synths with this kind of feature is an exciting prospect to me

  7. This is very cool. It would be great to turn this research into a hardware sampler with focus on the performance aspect. I am thinking of a double expression pedal that can be programmed into presets along with the wheels, so that different aspects of the two sounds can be merged at different speeds / times / intensity.

  8. Anybody remember PatchMorpher? Did this for 10-odd hardware synths. With finer control over which section you were morphing, oscillators, LFOs, envelopes etc. Also very important to have quantising when morphing pitch, unless you want the glissandos.

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