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This is very, very cool. My problem with most music programming environments (in my humble, but very informed opinion) is that . . . they don't sound very good

This is very, very cool. My problem with most music programming environments (in my humble, but very informed opinion) is that . . . they don't sound very good. That is, the oscillators, filters, envelopes, etc. don't sound anywhere near as good as what you can buy from UAD, SoftTube, PSP, U-he, etc. The OP may be a DSP genius for all I know, and maybe it sounds incredible. I haven't tried it yet. But it seems (just glancing over it) that there's an emphasis on manipulating existing audio files. This is actually huge. It's true that you can do that things like ChuCK and csound and whatever, but they never felt focused on that to me. The biggest player in this "let's mess with audio files" space was the Composer's Desktop Project. That thing was amazing, but it seems slightly moribund, and I haven't been able to get it to compile for years. Anyway: I can't wait to dig in!

indigochill 6y ago
Is the problem of the oscillators not sounding very good a fundamental problem of these programming environments? I'm mostly ignorant of their specifics, but my assumption is that someone who understands the fundamentals of synth programming could patch oscs and filters into combinations that do sound nice just as well as they could in commercial synth software. Is there something preventing that from being the case? Or are you just referring to available presets?
- djaychela 6y ago
  Most good sounding vintage synth oscillators have waveforms that are far from the mathematical "ideal" that they are named after. This gives them extra harmonics and therefore character that vanilla DSP creations generally lack. Same goes for filters, too. When they are meticulously modelled on these originals, then they can sound very good, but otherwise tend to lack the character of the sounds many of us have grown up with.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  It's not the combinations, it's the tasteful application of oversampling, waveshape control, and distortion. Moog's iPad apps and the new UAD Minimoog both sound pretty good, so there's no practical reason why DSP synthesis should sound bad. The only thing preventing that being used here is the complexity of the models and the fact they tend to be proprietary. Supercollider, Max, Csound, PD, and ChucK all use the simplest possible public domain models, and even the best of the simple models aren't good enough to generate sounds with the production values you'll hear in a commercial recording. Generally the computer music community doesn't pay attention to production values at all. They're happy with a workable basic implementation of $effect or $synthesis_element, and they lose interest in the rest. That's partly because DSP with high production values takes a long time and work. There's a story that gets told about the TC Electronic 6000 system, which has a gold standard reverb you'll hear in most movies [1] - which is that it was the work of a team of more than ten people working for years. It's not hard to hack together a basic reverb algo from public sources. But it is not going to sound that good. [1] You know the ambient piano sound some movies have in their scores? That. If you want to buy that reverb the hardware costs nearly $17,000.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    To add - the CDP people solved the problem by doing things no one else was doing. It was Trevor Wishart's pet project and it was never going to be commercially viable, but he put some very interesting ideas into it. I played with it for a while and got a good few you-can't-do-this-with-a-synth sounds out of it. It was probably ten years ahead of its time and it's much easier to do that kind of thing today with modern processor speeds. I used to know some of the CDP people and there was a story that one of them left a script running on his Atari ST and then went on holiday for two weeks. It still hadn't finished when he got back. It would probably take a few minutes today.
erikschoster 6y ago
Thanks for checking it out! Trevor Wishart & CDP have been inspirations, I've incorporated some of his ideas surrounding waveset synthesis & transformations into pippi. Primarily, pippi is the environment I use to compose my own music, and its features and approaches are driven mostly by my own compositional needs & wants. I work often from a "microsound" approach so pippi does have more of a focus on manipulating concrete sound than maybe other systems do. Do the oscs sound good? I think they sound fine, but I haven't worked with any of the products you mentioned. Commercial synths & DSP I think tends to be focused on providing instruments via opinionated complexes of osc, filters, presets etc as you mentioned. General purpose systems like ChucK etc tend more toward facilitating the user in building their own opinionated instruments, so the path from oscs, filters to a sound you like might take more doing, and some more background in synthesis to arrive at. That's not to say some opinionated complexes haven't made their way into pippi... but my goal is to allow myself to build instruments in a flexible way just as much as being able to have an expressive way to orchestrate their movements. I sometimes keep a small personal library of instruments I return to with pippi, but it never tends to last very long. I have a hard time fully disentangling the instrument building side of things from the compositional side of things in my own work. That said, I want pippi to be fun, and useful for others, so including some more preset-like instruments along with the lower level building blocks is definitely in scope for the project! Edit: FWIW the osc I use personally most often is `Pulsar2d` which is an opinionated implementation of Curtis Roads' pulsar synthesis, where both the wavetable and window stacks can be morphed over time. I often feed this with a stack derived via `wavesets.Waveset()` -- which will split a sound at zero crossings into wavesets, optionally at some interval, offset or some limit, so you can for example tap single cycles of some transforming sound over time, and reconstruct the movement of the spectrum of it in some way by morphing the stack as you like with the `Pulsar2d`... The next set of tutorials is overdue and will cover synthesis (microsound and otherwise) in more detail!

indigochill 6y ago

Is the problem of the oscillators not sounding very good a fundamental problem of these programming environments? I'm mostly ignorant of their specifics, but my assumption is that someone who understands the fundamentals of synth programming could patch oscs and filters into combinations that do sound nice just as well as they could in commercial synth software. Is there something preventing that from being the case? Or are you just referring to available presets?

djaychela 6y ago
Most good sounding vintage synth oscillators have waveforms that are far from the mathematical "ideal" that they are named after. This gives them extra harmonics and therefore character that vanilla DSP creations generally lack. Same goes for filters, too. When they are meticulously modelled on these originals, then they can sound very good, but otherwise tend to lack the character of the sounds many of us have grown up with.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
It's not the combinations, it's the tasteful application of oversampling, waveshape control, and distortion. Moog's iPad apps and the new UAD Minimoog both sound pretty good, so there's no practical reason why DSP synthesis should sound bad. The only thing preventing that being used here is the complexity of the models and the fact they tend to be proprietary. Supercollider, Max, Csound, PD, and ChucK all use the simplest possible public domain models, and even the best of the simple models aren't good enough to generate sounds with the production values you'll hear in a commercial recording. Generally the computer music community doesn't pay attention to production values at all. They're happy with a workable basic implementation of $effect or $synthesis_element, and they lose interest in the rest. That's partly because DSP with high production values takes a long time and work. There's a story that gets told about the TC Electronic 6000 system, which has a gold standard reverb you'll hear in most movies [1] - which is that it was the work of a team of more than ten people working for years. It's not hard to hack together a basic reverb algo from public sources. But it is not going to sound that good. [1] You know the ambient piano sound some movies have in their scores? That. If you want to buy that reverb the hardware costs nearly $17,000.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  To add - the CDP people solved the problem by doing things no one else was doing. It was Trevor Wishart's pet project and it was never going to be commercially viable, but he put some very interesting ideas into it. I played with it for a while and got a good few you-can't-do-this-with-a-synth sounds out of it. It was probably ten years ahead of its time and it's much easier to do that kind of thing today with modern processor speeds. I used to know some of the CDP people and there was a story that one of them left a script running on his Atari ST and then went on holiday for two weeks. It still hadn't finished when he got back. It would probably take a few minutes today.

erikschoster 6y ago

Thanks for checking it out! Trevor Wishart & CDP have been inspirations, I've incorporated some of his ideas surrounding waveset synthesis & transformations into pippi. Primarily, pippi is the environment I use to compose my own music, and its features and approaches are driven mostly by my own compositional needs & wants. I work often from a "microsound" approach so pippi does have more of a focus on manipulating concrete sound than maybe other systems do. Do the oscs sound good? I think they sound fine, but I haven't worked with any of the products you mentioned. Commercial synths & DSP I think tends to be focused on providing instruments via opinionated complexes of osc, filters, presets etc as you mentioned. General purpose systems like ChucK etc tend more toward facilitating the user in building their own opinionated instruments, so the path from oscs, filters to a sound you like might take more doing, and some more background in synthesis to arrive at. That's not to say some opinionated complexes haven't made their way into pippi... but my goal is to allow myself to build instruments in a flexible way just as much as being able to have an expressive way to orchestrate their movements. I sometimes keep a small personal library of instruments I return to with pippi, but it never tends to last very long. I have a hard time fully disentangling the instrument building side of things from the compositional side of things in my own work. That said, I want pippi to be fun, and useful for others, so including some more preset-like instruments along with the lower level building blocks is definitely in scope for the project! Edit: FWIW the osc I use personally most often is `Pulsar2d` which is an opinionated implementation of Curtis Roads' pulsar synthesis, where both the wavetable and window stacks can be morphed over time. I often feed this with a stack derived via `wavesets.Waveset()` -- which will split a sound at zero crossings into wavesets, optionally at some interval, offset or some limit, so you can for example tap single cycles of some transforming sound over time, and reconstruct the movement of the spectrum of it in some way by morphing the stack as you like with the `Pulsar2d`... The next set of tutorials is overdue and will cover synthesis (microsound and otherwise) in more detail!