Soundmachines NS1nanosynth, Руководство пользователя

Страница: 6 / 25

A synthesis primer:
For the people that doesn't came from synthesis or from music production, in the next two pages
you will find some basic concepts that will be extremely useful to better understand the following
chapter and to enjoy this instrument. Let's start by defining the main characteristics of 'sound'.
Among the few definition of sound, stands the one that I like more: it's the perceptive
phenomenon that our earing subsystem triggers when more or less repetitive variation in the
density of the air reach our inner ear organs. This is not the only definition nor the most precise
one, but as I said, I like it enough to write it here.
A sound is then characterized by a handful of 'parameters', or qualities. The optimal subset, for
what we are going to explain in the following pages (again, far for being complete under a
scientific POV) is:
•
pitch
•
timbre
•
loudness
Those are neither static qualities, nor the only ones, but they adds up nicely in this contest.
Consider, for starter, that the timbre of a sound could easily modify the pitch until
unrecognizable...
So, Pitch is the 'tone' of the sound, what we associate with the concept of 'note'. Not all sounds
have a defined pitch, think about the sound of the waves crashing on the beach... In a more
harmonic enviroment, such as a techno-­‐trance song, the pitch is responsible, for example, of the
bassline that supports the harmonic progression of the piece itself. Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si, in Italian.
fig.3 Musical octaves and their pitch
The second 'parameter', the timbre, is the microscopic 'shape' of the sounds. Microscopic on a
time scale. Mainly we are talking about the waveform and its dynamic transformations... Think
about the timbre of a cello, in contrast to the one of a human soprano, or that of a Strato passing
through a fuzz pedal with almost dead batteries... One of the first 'missions' of the electronic
musical instruments was the simulation or emulation of traditional musical instruments. Where a
triangle wave resemble, with a touch of vibrato (pitch modulation) the voice of a soprano, the
narrow pulse rectangular wave could trigger in our brain a certain association with the nasal sound