Generate your own sounds with NSynth

[asher]

This story reminded me to clean up a very different synth and put it on github:

https://github.com/wildsparx/synthem80

Unlike NSynth, synthem80 is directed to a specific and humble goal - make early 80s-style arcade sounds. It uses a mini-language to control an engine similar to that in Pacman.

For instance, the sound when Pacman eats a ghost:

    ./synthem80 -o eat-monster.sw 'timer(t=0.5) wav(wf=1 f=2 a=45) add(a=< b=48) nmc(wf=5 f=<)'

[svantana]

I'm sorry but is the Deep Learning Hype strong enough to warp people's sensory perception? Every sample on this page sounds terrible IMHO, and pretty much what you would get if you would spend 10 minutes implementing the most naive spectrogram resynthesis you could think of. Granted, there is great promise in finding the "manifold of music", which seems to be the goal here, but what they show is just not anywhere near that promise.

[anigbrowl]

Agreed. The texture is nice - I enjoy a low-fi sound - but the fun of sound engineering is building your own signal paths to modulate or destroy sound interactively. The more abstracted the sound generation method, the more of a toy and the less of a tool it is, because the rising non-linearities make it increasingly difficult to pursue a specific objective. This has alway sbeen a limiting factor for FM, where undirected noodling can certainly yield interesting results, but not very controllable ones beyond3 or 4 operators.

I do think it's interesting and valuable work. But it's worth bearing in mind that there's no shortage of great resynthesis tools already, and that musicians are besieged with offers from technologists for Sounds! That! Have! Never! Been! Possible! Before! While you can always rely on Jordan Rudess to provide a celebrity endorsement to the keyboard collector crowd, most hobbyist musicians eventually get over chasing novelty and end up reducing their equipment load to a smaller number of really well-engineered devices or software tools that they really like and get to know inside out.

[mbell]

The 'cello' and 'laaa...' actually made me quickly remove my headphones. Having 'character' is not even close to how I would describe these.

[shams93]

They're using very low quality sample rates, 8 bit, not pretty. Until it can do 32 hit samples it's going to sound horrible.

[microcolonel]

Yeah, granted there are neural resynthesis packages which do function, they are just waaay too slow for realtime audio production at the moment (and probably will be for a long time, now that moore's law is dead).

[the_cat_kittles]

i feel stupid and do not get what this is all about. so there is something that synthesizes sounds by feeding it audio files? i dont get what is happening here. i tried semi hard to understand, but i figure someone can give the big picture that i think im missing.

[sowbug]

Could this approach be used for media compression? I've wondered how compressible a popular-music track could be if you had a sufficiently rich language to describe it. This seems like a method to answer that question.

[kuschku]

This would be basically MIDI, right?

[tomcam]

Would probably require an enormous dictionary on the decoding end

[sebringj]

I'm just starting to learn tensorflow from a developer non-data-scientist view. This is great. From a laymen view, it seems it needs a training session for eliminating noise or static.

[ryan-allen]

I think the N sounds for 'not a' synth. I have a heap of synths and they make much nicer sounds!

[6stringmerc]

Eh seen this submitted before, totally agree with the early criticism here because it's the same as the last time.

Woo hoo you built a noise maker! Kazoos for everybody!

[seandougall]

But it also does convolution! I totally wasn't doing that in Max/MSP in 2003.

Snark aside, there's a lot of really awesome creative potential stemming from WaveNet. This just seems like the least novel application I've seen.

[funkychicken]

Apple missed a golden objective-c opportunity here.