MUME 2016 - The Fourth International Workshop on Musical Metacreation, ISBN #978-0-86491-397-5 Towards User-Tailored Creative Applications of Concatenative Synthesis in Electronic Dance Music Carthach´ O´ Nuanain,´ Sergi Jorda,` Perfecto Herrera Music Technology Group Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona
[email protected] Abstract speech synthesis (Hunt and Black 1996), where the descrip- tions need to be extremely accurate in producing effective The ecosystem of concatenative synthesis systems is reconstructions of natural speech. Music tends to be a bit large, diverse and oftentimes esoteric. In this article, more forgiving. Indeed, depending on the goals of the com- we examine many of its key works, attempting to poser, accuracy is not always the intended thought in mind. summarise, compare and categorise their characteristic traits. We observe that many existing systems have not Informally, we begin with some music, we deconstruct it, taken into account any user other than the designer of we describe it symbolically using some numerical descrip- the system. Subsequently we position our own imple- tors and then put it back together in some new form. It is mentation in this ecosystem as geared specifically with related to granular synthesis (Roads 2004), but operates on electronic dance music producers in mind. Through in- longer, more descriptive orders of scale. tensive discussion with producers and commercial mu- In the next section we present a summary of many of the sic software practitioners we summarise their reactions, concatenative synthesisers presented in the literature. Some responses and impressions to the usability and musical- are scarcely described, some are fully-formed commercial ity of this approach to music creation.