Structured Additive Synthesis: Towards a Model of Sound Timbre and Electroacoustic Music Forms

M. Desainte-Catherine (1) , Sylvain Marchand (1)

1 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique

We have developed a sound model used for exploring sound timbre. This model 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 vocabulary of composers of electro-acoustic music as well as by the literature and constitute a solid base for investigating scientic research on the notion of timbre. Several analyses of electro-acoustic pieces have been performed in collaboration between scientists and musicians. We have identied the need for a certain number of manipulations of sound, that we have determined to be straightforward in our model. Applications of the SAS model are numerous. A new language for musical composition has been implemented and should provide a way to validate and enrich the model.

Domaines: Autre [cs.OH]

M. Desainte-Catherine, Sylvain Marchand. Structured Additive Synthesis: Towards a Model of Sound Timbre and Electroacoustic Music Forms. Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC99), Oct 1999, China. pp.260--263. ⟨hal-00308406⟩