Melatonin Sine Machine Additive Synthesizer w/ Hundreds of Oscillators

video uploads by Melatonin

via Melatonin

"Sine Machine is a new kind of additive synth

Sine Machine’s engine delivers an order of magnitude more oscillators than is reasonable for any synthesizer to have.

Hundreds of dots light up as you play. Each dot is an active oscillator. But don’t worry, they’ll only sip CPU…

Want the odd harmonics to fade out faster? Want to delay the upper harmonics? You can sculpt your dream sound with the envelope editor and visualize each change you make to your sound.

Be a control freak

Want to set the release time for Harmonic 14 to exactly 2.9 seconds?

You can do that. Each harmonic has its own amplitude envelope (DADSHR).

Play it by ear

Sometimes you just want to play. Thousands of knobs can be daunting…. especially when half of them don’t seem to change the sound at all!

Sine Machine lets you see and hear every change. There’s no need to remember where the One Knob That Actually Does Something is hiding (currently, there are no knobs at all).

Rooted in psychoacoustics

From the default 1/f amplitude profile of the volume bars to morphing exponential curves of envelopes — each parameter is custom ranged and tuned to help you make beautiful sounds for other humans.

Built from first principles
This is not a kitchen sink collection of off-the-shelf dsp building blocks.

Effects aren’t the same-old audio effects slapped on top. They are an intimate part of the synthesis engine itself. This gives you access to brand new sonic frontiers and per-harmonic effects never before possible.

Just a Microsecond

Sine Machine’s performance tolerances are measured in μs.

The engine is backed by hundreds of automated tests running across dozens of sample rates on MacOS, Windows and Linux.

Cleanest oscillators in town

Digital wavetable and FM synths work hard to filter and hack around noisy aliasing. Sine Machine is in full control of each and every harmonic, so it’s trivial to never produce a frequency over Nyquist."

MAKEN0ISE: Complex Sequencing from Simple Patching

Published on Feb 20, 2019 MAKEN0ISE

"It’s typical for synthesizer architecture to be described in terms of so-called “voices” and “polyphony”… you have the monophonic synthesizer with one voice, like the Minimoog… or the polyphonic synthesizer with multiple voices, like the Roland Jupiter series. Any break from this architecture gets argued over seemingly endlessly. Take a look at the so-called “paraphonic” synth, like the Korg Poly-800, where there are multiple oscillators but they all a share a gate structure. Or the modular synth, which is typically polyphonic, but in a polytimbral fashion rather than the monotrimbral chords you hear from a keyboard polysynth. If you need a boost to your melatonin levels you can go to a synthesizer convention and listen to somebody give an hours-long presentation on how to define these various terms, and just what does and does not count as “polyphony.”

The dogma of the voice structure is encoded right into the MIDI standard, still the most recognized way to control synthesizers and other electronic instruments. A MIDI Note ALWAYS has a start point and end point that are tied to a particular pitch value or note number. You never have one without the other. To be sure, this is roughly the way it works in the so-called real world on acoustic keyboard instruments. When you press a key on a piano, you are starting that particular note, and when you release it, you are ending that particular note.

But synthesizers are not acoustic instruments. The gate structure that tells when a note starts and ends does not have any intrinsic relationship to that note’s pitch… yet if anyone ever showed you how to use a modular synth they probably started by showing you how to patch a monosynth. The VCO goes to the VCA, which is opened by a gate that comes at the same time as new note values. MIDI messages are so rigid in their form that for decades people have been using programs like Max and Pure Data to break them into component parts and put them back together in more interesting ways, because it can almost never be done using a MIDI controller and a synth alone. But a modular synthesizer has no such limitation. CV and Gate signals are independent by nature and design.

In this video we'll take a couple simple sequences from René and vastly increase their complexity by just swapping the destinations of their gate outputs."