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> An interesting development was the discovery that, if the operators started with square, rather than sine, waveforms, it didn’t take as many operators to crea
by esafak 2y ago
> An interesting development was the discovery that, if the operators started with square, rather than sine, waveforms, it didn’t take as many operators to create interesting sounds.
Is this true? How and why? I imagine the square basis also contributed to the brilliance, not being band-limited.
- rjh29 2y agoIt has the most harmonics.
- alterom 2y agoJust to add: harmonics are sine waves, in essence. A pure sine wave has only one harmonic. You need to add up a bunch of sine waves of different frequencies (multiples of the fundamental) to get something as, in a way, unnatural as a square (or sawtooth) wave. That's why they're great building blocks for subtractive synthesis too. Pass them through a resonant filter, and you get something interesting. They are also very easy to make digitally (a square wave is just on-off-on-off..).