Structured Additive Synthesis: Towards a Model of Sound Timbre and Electroacoustic Music Forms M
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Structured Additive Synthesis: Towards a Model of Sound Timbre and Electroacoustic Music Forms M. Desainte-Catherine, Sylvain Marchand To cite this version: M. Desainte-Catherine, Sylvain Marchand. Structured Additive Synthesis: Towards a Model of Sound Timbre and Electroacoustic Music Forms. Proceedings of the International Computer Music Confer- ence (ICMC99), Oct 1999, China. pp.260–263. hal-00308406 HAL Id: hal-00308406 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00308406 Submitted on 30 Jul 2008 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. 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Structured Additive Synthesis Towards a Mo del of Sound Timbre and Electroacoustic Music Forms Myriam DesainteCatherine myriamlabriubordeauxfr Sylvain Marchand smlabriubordeauxfr SCRIME LaBRI Universite Bordeaux I cours de la Liberation F Talence Cedex France Abstract We have develop ed a sound mo del used for exploring sound timbre This mo del is called Structured Additive Synthesis or SAS for short It has the exibility of additive synthesis while addressing the fact that basic additive synthesis is extremely dicult to use directly for creating and editing sounds SAS consists of a complete abstraction of sounds according to only four parameters amplitude frequency color and warping These parameters are inspired by the vo cabulary of comp osers of electroacoustic music as well as by the literature and constitute a solid base for investigating scientic research on the notion of timbre Several analyses of electroacoustic pieces have b een p erformed in collab oration b etween scientists and musicians We have identied the need for a certain numb er of manipulations of sound that we have determined to b e straightforward in our mo del Applications of the SAS mo del are numerous A new language for musical comp osition has b een implemented and should provide a way to validate and enrich the mo del tween parameters of dierent parts of the piece Intro duction When the piece is written the analysis is The SCRIME is an organization for scientic based on the musical score which provides the ini researchers in computer science at the Univer tial segmentation Electroacoustic musical pieces sity and music comp osers of the Conservatoire constitute a very sp ecial case b ecause they are not to collab orate Pro jects of the SCRIME should written Their supp ort is magnetic or numeric not only b e scientically valid but also musically Among the analyses identied by Francois De relevant Research pro jects of this structure are lalande Del we chose to p erform the p oietic mainly situated in the eld of the assistance for pro ductionoriented and aesthesic reception comp osition of electroacoustic music We ob oriented ones serve and try to understand actual practices of electroacoustic comp osers in order to provide our Poietic analysis is based on pro duction Such research in sound and music mo deling with new an analysis can b e carried out in collab oration elements One motivation is the study of sound with the comp oser of the piece to analyze Its timbre from a p erceptual and musical p oint of ob jective is to study the musical discourse in or view in collab oration with psychoacousticians der to nd out information ab out the pro duction Another motivation is to provide comp osers with of the piece that is the to ols and the practices to ols well adapted to their actual needs that were used in order to build the piece In this pap er we present three research sub Aesthesic analysis is based on listening Such jects that are relevant in order to reach our ob an analysis can b e p erformed by a comp oser or jectives The second section presents the analy by a listener who is very familiar with electro sis of electroacoustic music which is studied in acoustic music or by conducting exp eriments in close collab oration with comp osers The third volving several listeners This kind of analysis section presents the SAS sound mo del that has provides information on the way listeners under b een implemented and is b een validated in collab stand electroacoustic music oration with psychoacousticians and comp osers As a matter of fact only p oietic and aesthesic The fourth section shows the applications of this analyses provide information concerning mo dels mo del in comp ositional and educational contexts that are in the comp osers mind when he com p oses music or when he listens to the music We Music Analysis conducted the following two analyses in collab o ration with comp osers A musical analysis of a piece consists rst in segmenting the piece in order to discover a tem We p erformed an aesthesic analysis of the sec p oral organization b etween several sound ob jects ond movement Balancement of the Variations Musical discourse can b e analyzed on the basis of p our une p orte et un soupir by Pierre Henry those sound ob jects by p ointing out relations b e this work has b een carried out in collab oration orem which states that any p erio dic function can with the comp oser Edgar Nicouleau DCN In b e mo deled as a sum of sinusoids at various am that movement inexions of the grating do or are plitudes and harmonic frequencies For pseudo very close to voice mo dulation so that they re p erio dic sounds these amplitudes and frequen mind listeners of melo dic rhythmic and dynamic cies evolve slowly with time controlling a set structures that are usually analyzed in that case of pseudosinusoidal oscillators commonly called Sound ob jects of the piece have b een itemized partials The audio signal a can b e calculated and then group ed in several families A com from these additive parameters using the follow mon formalism p ermits the description of the evo ing equations lutions of frequencies durations and amplitudes for all the sound ob jects This analysis leads to P quite classical results since it involves wellknown X at a t cos t structures like melo dy dynamic and rhythm Of p p p=1 course the case of the analyzed piece is very par ticular and such results cannot b e obtained with Z t any electroacoustic piece Anyway this research t f u du p p p may continue with the study of the timbre struc 0 tures where P is the numb er of partials and f a and p p We also p erformed a p oietic analysis of the are resp ectively the instantaneous frequency p second movement of La chute dIcare by Jean amplitude and phase of the pieth partial The Michel Rivet this work has b een carried out in P pairs f a are the parameters of the addi p p collab oration with him DCR A rst seg tive mo del and represent p oints in the frequency mentation is prop osed as well as a classication amplitude space as shown in gure of the sounds according to the pro duction of the Any sound can b e faithfully synthesized in real piece Then several segmentations based on this time from the mo del equations containing these classication are studied and a temp oral struc parameters The realtime synthesis has b een im ture is discovered This analysis has p ointed out plemented in the ReSp ect software to ol MS structures that were p ertinent for the comp oser The diculty is then to obtain these parame For example a classication of sounds was obtain ters from real existing sounds For that reason according to the comp osers criteria for cho osing we have develop ed an analysis metho d capable one sound rather than another Those criteria of converting sampled sounds into the SAS pa may vary from one comp oser to another and ac rameters implemented in the InSp ect program cording to his ob jectives so that it is necessary to MS It is of course p ossible to eliminate anal make the same kind of collab oration with several ysis entirely and create new sounds directly us comp osers The ob jective is on the one hand ing the parameters of our mo del This is indeed to nd out some musical elements which could p ossible b ecause there is a close corresp ondence b e useful to several comp osers and to help us in b etween these parameters and real music p ercep sound mo deling on the other hand tion All these analyses of electroacoustic pieces have b een p erformed in collab oration b etween sci entists and musicians of the SCRIME We have amplitude identied the need for a certain numb er of manip ulations of sounds Among these are mo dulation mixing ltering time stretching crosssynthesis C morphing as well as new ways to create hybrid f a p p sounds The problem was yet to nd a sound mo del allowing the comp osers to p erform these manipulations in an intuitive and musical way The SAS Mo del The Structured Additive Synthesis SAS mo del is a sp ectral sound mo del based on additive frequency synthesis The SAS parameters are inspired by time F the vo cabulary of comp osers of electroacoustic music as well as by the literature We prop ose to fo cus on the p erception of the sound rather than Figure the sp ectrum of an harmonic sound its physical cause in order to unify sound mi croscopic and music macroscopic We prop ose as well to consider the musical intention of the Structured Additive Synthesis instrumentalist instead of his physical action on The additive