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What’s a Spherical Wavetable?
A Spherical wavetable (or “Sphere” for short) is a group of waveforms. Think of a
waveform as a timbre, or how an instrument “sounds”. A Sphere is a collection of 27
waveforms. As you turn any of the navigation knobs on the
SWN
(
Latitude, Longitude,
Depth,
or
Browse
) you select which of the 27 waveforms to play. The
SWN
smoothly
morphs between waveforms as you navigate, thus creating new waveforms on the fly. A
Sphere is so-named because you move between the waveforms in three dimensions (Latitude, Longitude, and
Depth), and each dimension wraps around to the beginning when you reach the end. (The analogy to a sphere is
not perfect, see the Mathematical Note page 11 if you’re curious about the true geometry of the
SWN
.)
Page of
8
32
A waveform
SWN
’s wavetables visualized as a 3 x 3 x 3 matrix
SWN’
s wavetables visualized as concentric spheres