17 ms·

Making synthesized sounds more acoustic

167 points by beardicus 3y ago

bravura 3y ago
Anyone interested in discussing these topics, I'd like to discuss more, since it's what I'm working on. My email is my profile. I'm also participating in discussion on the thread.
selfselfgo 3y ago
I always wondered about doing this with hardware. Surely there must be some other mechanism for accurately creating sounds then a flat magnetic speaker.
- jtriangle 3y ago
  re-recording digital stuff by playing the sound through something analog is a good way of making things feel more 'real', and can impart really interesting, hard to get character to a track. It's just time consuming to do, as the analogue world really only works in real time. Speakers, themselves, have an absurdly broad range of nonlinearity, even within a single speaker, the way it behaves at 10% power and the way it behaves at 90% power can be drastically different. That makes them fairly difficult to model. Impulse responses are the soup de jour, and do a good job, but, they only really model a slice of what a speaker can do, ie, a given amplitude.
- spunker540 3y ago
  I agree! Or at least I’ve always been curious about this myself.
- dharma1 3y ago
  You can use a transducer to excite any physical surface. This is how plate reverbs work for instance. You could stick one (or two) transducers to a guitar or piano and then mic it up, and get the sound of the body of that instrument and parasympathetic resonance of any undamped strings. The body is quite easily modelled with an impulse response, but parasympathetic resonance in DSP is still not great
sramsay 3y ago
Making synthesizers emulate the sound of real instruments was once a major goal of synthesis, but that has mostly faded outside of the rarefied world of physical modeling. Electronic musicians remain interested in sounding "warm" and "organic" (or the opposite), but it's rare to find someone who is really interested in making a synthesizer sound exactly like a guitar or a clarinet. But when I was learning FM synthesis (one of the harder ones), I found it incredibly useful to go through the exercise of trying to make a synthesizer sound like a convincing gong, or reed instrument, or guitar string. In fact, I don't think FM really clicked until I did that.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  This isn't about accurate recreations of acoustic instruments, it's about capturing some of the features of acoustic instruments in non-imitative patches to make them sound less sterile and simplistic. A lot of (non-MIDI) computer music is either drones, granular clouds, or percussive blips. There's an under-explored area of articulation and musical detail between those sounds and warm, mushy analog. The DX7 was a good first take at that. But today you can have hundreds of oscillators stacked and patched in any configuration you want instead of just six.
  - bravura 3y ago
    You can actually use thousands of oscillators, which is what Magenta did with their differentiable DSP (DDSP) approach to modeling acoustic instruments including singing: https://magenta.tensorflow.org/ddsp-vst https://magenta.tensorflow.org/ddsp-vst https://magenta.tensorflow.org/ddsp https://magenta.tensorflow.org/ddsp I doesn't sound realistic but it is expressive in an unusual way.
  - Blackthorn 3y ago
    Feels like some better instruments can help with this, over the basic keyboard. Things with polyphonic aftertouch, or electronic wind instruments, or more advanced surfaces like the Linnstrument or Continuum.
- MrScruff 3y ago
half-kh-hacker 3y ago
I'm working on an additive synthesizer right now and it's so fun to make plucks where the partials have different envelopes
waffletower 3y ago
I find this article to be shallow and dismissive: even twenty years ago waveguides worked very well at modeling many acoustic instruments. If readers would like an introduction to waveguides this is one of the foundational papers: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234809707_Theory_of_Banded_Waveguides https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234809707_Theory_of...
- pierrec 3y ago
  I found it pretty reasonable. I've implemented both physical modeling and more traditional subtractive synthesis algorithms, and I fully agree with the author that physical modeling takes "more engineering tenacity" to implement correctly. Mastering simpler techniques before diving into physical modeling is something I would highly recommend, and that's exactly what the author is doing. Giving some degree of realism to subtractive synthesis is fun and can give great results too.
bongodongobob 3y ago
Hard disagree with #18. If you don't pull your bass register into mono (or really close to it) it's going to sound like ass in small spaces, like a car, or big spaces, like a club or big stage. I struggled for quite a while with getting bass to sound right on different systems and pushing the bass into mono helped a ton. Also consider the length of the waves. If you're playing on a system in a club that has the subs 50 feet apart, you're going to get weird nodes from comb filtering and the bass will just disappear in certain places in the room. I'm not aware of stereo bass having anything to do with vinyl, the issue is overall bass volume. Most of the other ideas are pretty good and can be summed up as follows: Humanize/randomize pitch, velocity, and rhythm Use distortion to add extra harmonics Don't use a flute patch 2 octaves below C or a contrabass patch 4 octaves above C, respect the "true" frequency range of the patch Use appropriate panning Use reverb (Actually I disagree with the idea of using many different reverbs. Your ears will pick up on it and it will sound unnatural. IF you do this, turn up the reverb until you can hear it, and then dial it all the way back until it seems to disappear.)
- InCityDreams 3y ago
  >Don't use a flute patch 2 octaves below C or a contrabass patch 4 octaves above C, respect the "true" frequency range of the patch If you're going for realism, then yes. If not - push the ranges, see what happens. >(Actually I disagree with the idea of using many different reverbs. Your ears will pick up on it and it will sound unnatural. IF you do this, turn up the reverb until you can hear it, and then dial it all the way back until it seems to disappear.) I believe it was Zappa, trying to rescue his LSO recordings, so he placed each section in a different 'atmosphere'. Sorry, on mobile but I'm sure it's mentioned in (at least one of) his book(s).
- H1Supreme 3y ago
  > I'm not aware of stereo bass having anything to do with vinyl, the issue is overall bass volume. It has to do with the needle coming out of the groove if low frequencies are out of phase. I agree with your point though. The lower a frequency gets, the less directional it gets. So, bass sounds in stereo are even more pointless for most music.
alekseiprokopev 3y ago
About a decade ago, within my circle of amateur musicians, it was considered nearly impossible to achieve an ‘acoustic’ sound using a completely digital loop. The simplest method found to enhance the quality of a synthetic sound was to play it through a speaker and then capture it using a microphone.
- worik 3y ago
  Yes. One problem with that is that good microphones are expensive, likewise, but less so, good speakers. One of the wonders about modern electronic music is the low prices of digital audio processing (i.e. computers) equipment. That and the general geek points for making something sound like an acoustic instrument.
cmason 3y ago
This is really interesting to me but there’s a few things here that are beyond my reach. Could anyone describe these in more detail or point to references? * partials? Is that another word for harmonics? * “Box tone”? * Breakpoint synthesis? ChatGPT suggests this is a kind of interpolation but I don’t quite get it. Any general references would be really appreciated. Thank you!
- cmason 3y ago
  Partials: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music)#Partial https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music)#Part... Still curious about the others.
  - edlinfan 3y ago
    In this case, web search with site:XX.name worked better than the LLM. Breakpoint synthesis https://nathan.ho.name/posts/nonstandard-oscillators/ https://nathan.ho.name/posts/nonstandard-oscillators/ Box tone isn't a term I'm familiar with, but from context the author seems to be talking about the sound contributed by an instrument's soundboard or cabinet. EDIT: Another possibility, https://gearspace.com/board/mastering-forum/1401491-box-tone-terminology.html https://gearspace.com/board/mastering-forum/1401491-box-tone...
- Pine_Mushroom 3y ago
  'Box Tone' refers to the special sonic signature imparted by a piece of gear, for instance a preamp or a compressor.
cwillu 3y ago
Missing: in polyphonic instruments, notes affect other notes. For instance, on a piano, a staccato C2 by itself is a totally different beast from a staccato C2 played while the dampers are off other keys, from a haunting reverb from notes in a higher register to deep overtones from notes in a lower register. Most simulated pianos these days add the extra harmonics when the sustain pedal is pressed, but very few seem to get the harmonics from the dampers being lifted per-key; PianoTeq gets this right.
- ta988 3y ago
  Is there a way to listen to that? (without a real piano or a synth)
  - cwillu 3y ago
    I'm not at home for a couple days, but http://cwillu.com/files/sympathetic-resonance.rot.mkv http://cwillu.com/files/sympathetic-resonance.rot.mkv should give some sense: iirc I didn't pedal at all in this piece (or maybe only a little, honestly don't remember, it was a couple years ago now), but there are 3 or 4 keys held down silently.
- plussed_reader 3y ago
  That resonance can be a defining element depending on the intent; the butteryness of the Rhodes style electric piano is due to individual pickups on each note picking up neighboring note resonance. I think you're touching on the overall concept of harmonic and enharmonic overtones in sound synthesis.
  - cwillu 3y ago
    Yes, exactly.
- louthy 3y ago
  I have a Roland LX708 [1] that gets a lot of this right, like sympathetic resonance, and all the other artefacts of a real piano. It’s pretty damn good and it’s clear that modelling has come a long way, but still not as ‘rich’ as a real piano. I wonder what the last mile is or whether acoustic modeling will always be stuck in a kind of ‘uncanny valley for sound’. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j9PDMdxm7Uo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j9PDMdxm7Uo
dharma1 3y ago
Finite difference methods are phd level difficult but that’s how you get the best results currently. Check out physicalaudio.co.uk
plastic3169 3y ago
I found this very interesting. I’ve done video synthesis and it creates quite nice results if you add a lot of similar analogue inspired tunings to very digital and simple oscillators. Slight randomness to everything, noise floor, over cranked signal that distorts and blooms, color channels mismatching, uneveness across screen, dirty color values of white and black, ringing, trailing etc. Especially if everything is tuned so subtle that it’s just barely noticable.
goodmachine 3y ago
This is a pretty solid list, props to OP for putting his observations all in one place! I definitely agree with 2,3 that clippy hard transients are cool (clipping is in general a bit underrated as a creative synthesis tool). From my general experience playing and designing with the 'classical' synth approaches (additive, subtractive, FM/PM) nice results are the cumulative result of many tiny hacks of the kind listed, well-judged micro-aberrations. The spice makes the dish, that is. This makes design and testing patches a somewhat infinite, fiddly task. Or endless fun, depending on your point of view. Obviously, if you want to productise your thing - ie you'd like other people to use it - this you now have a control problem: bake in dozens of parameters such that 'it just works' or make them all available and let the user figure it out themselves.
aa-jv 3y ago
I recently observed an interesting technique being used to radically alter the perception of synthesized sounds, by using the Pianoteq piano simulator, turning off all of the string and core piano sounds, and leaving only the level and key noise samples playing, then layering this on top of a synth sound - it had the amazing effect of making the synthesizer patch sound very realistic, as it added key noises and environmental (striker) noises to the background .. it was quite astonishing how this radically effected the perception.
- goodmachine 3y ago
  Good move! Do you have a link for that? Would be interested to hear it FWIW, the Roland D50 did something similar, and used PCM samples to model the attack/transients... you could then use subtractive synthesis for the body of the sound. I would guess Pianoteq's key/striker modelling is a lot subtler! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_D-50?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_D-50?useskin=vector
kristiandupont 3y ago
I recently bought Reason only so I could play with their new physical modelling synth "Objekt" (https://www.reasonstudios.com/shop/rack-extension/objekt/ https://www.reasonstudios.com/shop/rack-extension/objekt/). It's the best of its kind that I have ever played with. It really feels like an uncategorized acoustic instrument. Highly recommended if you're into things like that!
HackedBunny 3y ago
Rex Basterfield makes tons of free synthesised VST instruments, but created an interesting 'resonating sound box' effect earlier this year that would seem relevant here for the box tone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NBm0CdJ8x0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NBm0CdJ8x0 Got to recommend his Sim-Cimbalom instrument too... he created and released this amazing synth 12 days after I suggested it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALKOXqQXyTs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALKOXqQXyTs Many of his instruments provide little details along the lines of those in the article (see his narrated YouTube vids), all freely-available here, most-recent at the bottom: http://flowstoners.com/quilcom http://flowstoners.com/quilcom
tabtab 3y ago
In the end it may be easier to reprocess the synth version with AI trained on acoustic sounds, ideally with options to select different performers' styles. The long list of algorithmic tips there may indeed work, but could be expensive to code, test, debug, and tune.
an_aparallel 3y ago
This is a topic close to my heart. In 2019 in the peak of lockdowns - i decided to indulge a backburner curiousity i've had for a decade and a bit - modular synthesis. I bought the recommended modules for Doepfer's rendition of a Trautonium (a ribbon input instrument) - which needs to be heard to be appreciated. One thing which this instrument showed me is how little pitch variation is utilised in synthesis. In this thread on modwiggler (modular synth forum) there's a very indepth convo about realistic bowing/string sounds. I tried recording a rendition of Hans Zimmer's memoirs of a geisha main theme violin solo (scroll down to the youtube clip of the geisha). The pitch being fully continuous and in control of the player injects incredible amounts of "realism" and "violin-ness" to the sound. The IR of violin body i added in this example is crude - BUT - it illustrates my point really nicely: https://modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=68150&start=100 https://modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=68150&start=100 I think both the attack pitch envelope is crucial to get this right as well as the pitch bends induced by the player. An even better illustration is in an even cruder synth i own - Unisyn's Pitch to CV converter has a VERY crude tri/square/saw wave - and the the pitch + volume - is the main carrier of expression - this is an example of me playing a bamboo flute into a mic - and having it converted to a saw wave synth patch through some reverb added in post - the flutiness is remarkable here imo: https://soundcloud.com/khaleeji/unisyn-flute-and-vocal-recording-examples-saw-wave-output-only https://soundcloud.com/khaleeji/unisyn-flute-and-vocal-recor... I have to shout out Fricko modules - in Euro being really cool forward thinking modules which aim to inject some novel building blocks for building acoustic sounds: https://fricko.home.blog/ https://fricko.home.blog/

167 points by beardicus 3y ago

Anyone interested in discussing these topics, I'd like to discuss more, since it's what I'm working on. My email is my profile. I'm also participating in discussion on the thread.

selfselfgo 3y ago

I always wondered about doing this with hardware. Surely there must be some other mechanism for accurately creating sounds then a flat magnetic speaker.

jtriangle 3y ago
re-recording digital stuff by playing the sound through something analog is a good way of making things feel more 'real', and can impart really interesting, hard to get character to a track. It's just time consuming to do, as the analogue world really only works in real time. Speakers, themselves, have an absurdly broad range of nonlinearity, even within a single speaker, the way it behaves at 10% power and the way it behaves at 90% power can be drastically different. That makes them fairly difficult to model. Impulse responses are the soup de jour, and do a good job, but, they only really model a slice of what a speaker can do, ie, a given amplitude.
spunker540 3y ago
I agree! Or at least I’ve always been curious about this myself.
dharma1 3y ago
You can use a transducer to excite any physical surface. This is how plate reverbs work for instance. You could stick one (or two) transducers to a guitar or piano and then mic it up, and get the sound of the body of that instrument and parasympathetic resonance of any undamped strings. The body is quite easily modelled with an impulse response, but parasympathetic resonance in DSP is still not great

sramsay 3y ago

Making synthesizers emulate the sound of real instruments was once a major goal of synthesis, but that has mostly faded outside of the rarefied world of physical modeling. Electronic musicians remain interested in sounding "warm" and "organic" (or the opposite), but it's rare to find someone who is really interested in making a synthesizer sound exactly like a guitar or a clarinet. But when I was learning FM synthesis (one of the harder ones), I found it incredibly useful to go through the exercise of trying to make a synthesizer sound like a convincing gong, or reed instrument, or guitar string. In fact, I don't think FM really clicked until I did that.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
This isn't about accurate recreations of acoustic instruments, it's about capturing some of the features of acoustic instruments in non-imitative patches to make them sound less sterile and simplistic. A lot of (non-MIDI) computer music is either drones, granular clouds, or percussive blips. There's an under-explored area of articulation and musical detail between those sounds and warm, mushy analog. The DX7 was a good first take at that. But today you can have hundreds of oscillators stacked and patched in any configuration you want instead of just six.
- bravura 3y ago
  You can actually use thousands of oscillators, which is what Magenta did with their differentiable DSP (DDSP) approach to modeling acoustic instruments including singing: https://magenta.tensorflow.org/ddsp-vst https://magenta.tensorflow.org/ddsp-vst https://magenta.tensorflow.org/ddsp https://magenta.tensorflow.org/ddsp I doesn't sound realistic but it is expressive in an unusual way.
- Blackthorn 3y ago
  Feels like some better instruments can help with this, over the basic keyboard. Things with polyphonic aftertouch, or electronic wind instruments, or more advanced surfaces like the Linnstrument or Continuum.
MrScruff 3y ago

half-kh-hacker 3y ago

I'm working on an additive synthesizer right now and it's so fun to make plucks where the partials have different envelopes

waffletower 3y ago

I find this article to be shallow and dismissive: even twenty years ago waveguides worked very well at modeling many acoustic instruments. If readers would like an introduction to waveguides this is one of the foundational papers: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234809707_Theory_of_Banded_Waveguides https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234809707_Theory_of...

pierrec 3y ago
I found it pretty reasonable. I've implemented both physical modeling and more traditional subtractive synthesis algorithms, and I fully agree with the author that physical modeling takes "more engineering tenacity" to implement correctly. Mastering simpler techniques before diving into physical modeling is something I would highly recommend, and that's exactly what the author is doing. Giving some degree of realism to subtractive synthesis is fun and can give great results too.

bongodongobob 3y ago

Hard disagree with #18. If you don't pull your bass register into mono (or really close to it) it's going to sound like ass in small spaces, like a car, or big spaces, like a club or big stage. I struggled for quite a while with getting bass to sound right on different systems and pushing the bass into mono helped a ton. Also consider the length of the waves. If you're playing on a system in a club that has the subs 50 feet apart, you're going to get weird nodes from comb filtering and the bass will just disappear in certain places in the room. I'm not aware of stereo bass having anything to do with vinyl, the issue is overall bass volume. Most of the other ideas are pretty good and can be summed up as follows: Humanize/randomize pitch, velocity, and rhythm Use distortion to add extra harmonics Don't use a flute patch 2 octaves below C or a contrabass patch 4 octaves above C, respect the "true" frequency range of the patch Use appropriate panning Use reverb (Actually I disagree with the idea of using many different reverbs. Your ears will pick up on it and it will sound unnatural. IF you do this, turn up the reverb until you can hear it, and then dial it all the way back until it seems to disappear.)

InCityDreams 3y ago
>Don't use a flute patch 2 octaves below C or a contrabass patch 4 octaves above C, respect the "true" frequency range of the patch If you're going for realism, then yes. If not - push the ranges, see what happens. >(Actually I disagree with the idea of using many different reverbs. Your ears will pick up on it and it will sound unnatural. IF you do this, turn up the reverb until you can hear it, and then dial it all the way back until it seems to disappear.) I believe it was Zappa, trying to rescue his LSO recordings, so he placed each section in a different 'atmosphere'. Sorry, on mobile but I'm sure it's mentioned in (at least one of) his book(s).
H1Supreme 3y ago
> I'm not aware of stereo bass having anything to do with vinyl, the issue is overall bass volume. It has to do with the needle coming out of the groove if low frequencies are out of phase. I agree with your point though. The lower a frequency gets, the less directional it gets. So, bass sounds in stereo are even more pointless for most music.

alekseiprokopev 3y ago

About a decade ago, within my circle of amateur musicians, it was considered nearly impossible to achieve an ‘acoustic’ sound using a completely digital loop. The simplest method found to enhance the quality of a synthetic sound was to play it through a speaker and then capture it using a microphone.

worik 3y ago
Yes. One problem with that is that good microphones are expensive, likewise, but less so, good speakers. One of the wonders about modern electronic music is the low prices of digital audio processing (i.e. computers) equipment. That and the general geek points for making something sound like an acoustic instrument.

cmason 3y ago

This is really interesting to me but there’s a few things here that are beyond my reach. Could anyone describe these in more detail or point to references? * partials? Is that another word for harmonics? * “Box tone”? * Breakpoint synthesis? ChatGPT suggests this is a kind of interpolation but I don’t quite get it. Any general references would be really appreciated. Thank you!

cmason 3y ago
Partials: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music)#Partial https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music)#Part... Still curious about the others.
- edlinfan 3y ago
  In this case, web search with site:XX.name worked better than the LLM. Breakpoint synthesis https://nathan.ho.name/posts/nonstandard-oscillators/ https://nathan.ho.name/posts/nonstandard-oscillators/ Box tone isn't a term I'm familiar with, but from context the author seems to be talking about the sound contributed by an instrument's soundboard or cabinet. EDIT: Another possibility, https://gearspace.com/board/mastering-forum/1401491-box-tone-terminology.html https://gearspace.com/board/mastering-forum/1401491-box-tone...
Pine_Mushroom 3y ago
'Box Tone' refers to the special sonic signature imparted by a piece of gear, for instance a preamp or a compressor.

cwillu 3y ago

Missing: in polyphonic instruments, notes affect other notes. For instance, on a piano, a staccato C2 by itself is a totally different beast from a staccato C2 played while the dampers are off other keys, from a haunting reverb from notes in a higher register to deep overtones from notes in a lower register. Most simulated pianos these days add the extra harmonics when the sustain pedal is pressed, but very few seem to get the harmonics from the dampers being lifted per-key; PianoTeq gets this right.

ta988 3y ago
Is there a way to listen to that? (without a real piano or a synth)
- cwillu 3y ago
  I'm not at home for a couple days, but http://cwillu.com/files/sympathetic-resonance.rot.mkv http://cwillu.com/files/sympathetic-resonance.rot.mkv should give some sense: iirc I didn't pedal at all in this piece (or maybe only a little, honestly don't remember, it was a couple years ago now), but there are 3 or 4 keys held down silently.
plussed_reader 3y ago
That resonance can be a defining element depending on the intent; the butteryness of the Rhodes style electric piano is due to individual pickups on each note picking up neighboring note resonance. I think you're touching on the overall concept of harmonic and enharmonic overtones in sound synthesis.
- cwillu 3y ago
  Yes, exactly.
louthy 3y ago
I have a Roland LX708 [1] that gets a lot of this right, like sympathetic resonance, and all the other artefacts of a real piano. It’s pretty damn good and it’s clear that modelling has come a long way, but still not as ‘rich’ as a real piano. I wonder what the last mile is or whether acoustic modeling will always be stuck in a kind of ‘uncanny valley for sound’. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j9PDMdxm7Uo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j9PDMdxm7Uo

dharma1 3y ago

Finite difference methods are phd level difficult but that’s how you get the best results currently. Check out physicalaudio.co.uk

plastic3169 3y ago

I found this very interesting. I’ve done video synthesis and it creates quite nice results if you add a lot of similar analogue inspired tunings to very digital and simple oscillators. Slight randomness to everything, noise floor, over cranked signal that distorts and blooms, color channels mismatching, uneveness across screen, dirty color values of white and black, ringing, trailing etc. Especially if everything is tuned so subtle that it’s just barely noticable.

goodmachine 3y ago

This is a pretty solid list, props to OP for putting his observations all in one place! I definitely agree with 2,3 that clippy hard transients are cool (clipping is in general a bit underrated as a creative synthesis tool). From my general experience playing and designing with the 'classical' synth approaches (additive, subtractive, FM/PM) nice results are the cumulative result of many tiny hacks of the kind listed, well-judged micro-aberrations. The spice makes the dish, that is. This makes design and testing patches a somewhat infinite, fiddly task. Or endless fun, depending on your point of view. Obviously, if you want to productise your thing - ie you'd like other people to use it - this you now have a control problem: bake in dozens of parameters such that 'it just works' or make them all available and let the user figure it out themselves.

aa-jv 3y ago

I recently observed an interesting technique being used to radically alter the perception of synthesized sounds, by using the Pianoteq piano simulator, turning off all of the string and core piano sounds, and leaving only the level and key noise samples playing, then layering this on top of a synth sound - it had the amazing effect of making the synthesizer patch sound very realistic, as it added key noises and environmental (striker) noises to the background .. it was quite astonishing how this radically effected the perception.

goodmachine 3y ago
Good move! Do you have a link for that? Would be interested to hear it FWIW, the Roland D50 did something similar, and used PCM samples to model the attack/transients... you could then use subtractive synthesis for the body of the sound. I would guess Pianoteq's key/striker modelling is a lot subtler! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_D-50?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_D-50?useskin=vector

kristiandupont 3y ago

I recently bought Reason only so I could play with their new physical modelling synth "Objekt" (https://www.reasonstudios.com/shop/rack-extension/objekt/ https://www.reasonstudios.com/shop/rack-extension/objekt/). It's the best of its kind that I have ever played with. It really feels like an uncategorized acoustic instrument. Highly recommended if you're into things like that!

HackedBunny 3y ago

Rex Basterfield makes tons of free synthesised VST instruments, but created an interesting 'resonating sound box' effect earlier this year that would seem relevant here for the box tone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NBm0CdJ8x0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NBm0CdJ8x0 Got to recommend his Sim-Cimbalom instrument too... he created and released this amazing synth 12 days after I suggested it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALKOXqQXyTs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALKOXqQXyTs Many of his instruments provide little details along the lines of those in the article (see his narrated YouTube vids), all freely-available here, most-recent at the bottom: http://flowstoners.com/quilcom http://flowstoners.com/quilcom

tabtab 3y ago

In the end it may be easier to reprocess the synth version with AI trained on acoustic sounds, ideally with options to select different performers' styles. The long list of algorithmic tips there may indeed work, but could be expensive to code, test, debug, and tune.

an_aparallel 3y ago

This is a topic close to my heart. In 2019 in the peak of lockdowns - i decided to indulge a backburner curiousity i've had for a decade and a bit - modular synthesis. I bought the recommended modules for Doepfer's rendition of a Trautonium (a ribbon input instrument) - which needs to be heard to be appreciated. One thing which this instrument showed me is how little pitch variation is utilised in synthesis. In this thread on modwiggler (modular synth forum) there's a very indepth convo about realistic bowing/string sounds. I tried recording a rendition of Hans Zimmer's memoirs of a geisha main theme violin solo (scroll down to the youtube clip of the geisha). The pitch being fully continuous and in control of the player injects incredible amounts of "realism" and "violin-ness" to the sound. The IR of violin body i added in this example is crude - BUT - it illustrates my point really nicely: https://modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=68150&start=100 https://modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=68150&start=100 I think both the attack pitch envelope is crucial to get this right as well as the pitch bends induced by the player. An even better illustration is in an even cruder synth i own - Unisyn's Pitch to CV converter has a VERY crude tri/square/saw wave - and the the pitch + volume - is the main carrier of expression - this is an example of me playing a bamboo flute into a mic - and having it converted to a saw wave synth patch through some reverb added in post - the flutiness is remarkable here imo: https://soundcloud.com/khaleeji/unisyn-flute-and-vocal-recording-examples-saw-wave-output-only https://soundcloud.com/khaleeji/unisyn-flute-and-vocal-recor... I have to shout out Fricko modules - in Euro being really cool forward thinking modules which aim to inject some novel building blocks for building acoustic sounds: https://fricko.home.blog/ https://fricko.home.blog/