Re: Mutitimbral - philosophy
Re: Mutitimbral - philosophy
- Subject: Re: Mutitimbral - philosophy
- From: Richard Dobson <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 23:06:00 +0100
One interesting use of a multi-timbral synth is as a guitar synthesizer. In many
such systems, each string is synthesized on a different MIDI Channel, in order
that string-bending can be made independent for each string (many controls in
MIDI are channel-wide, most significantly pitchbend). At the same time, the
"whammy bar" acts on all strings together, and thus is a single parameter change
sent to all relevent channels. This must therefore be exact, and it is clearly
better to have a single source for this control, and a single distribution
point. The neat-n-tidy way is therefore to have a multi-timbral synth to which
you can send messages for each of six channels, in conjunction with other
messages sent to the instrument. A single instrument that is six-channel
polyphonic is not sufficient - we are talking six distinct voices here, but six
voices that are very closely associated both philosophically and practically, to
say nothing of physically.
As I am merely luking on this list, and therefore not in a position to be
actively programming AudioUnits (yet), I am not in the best position to
comment, but I do worry about sentiments (which seem to be combined with a deep
sniff at anything so lotech as MIDI) which seem to suggest that users should be
required/expected to change to fit the software. Maybe this will happen some of
the time, but I don't see that it will happen all of the time, so an
architecture that fully supports "conventional" multi-timbral instruments, and
thus supports loading a single plugin that can function as a guitar synthesiser,
is likely to be more popular than one that doesn't!
Richard Dobson
Brian Willoughby wrote:
..
If the only reason for complicating the MusicDevice spec with multitimbral
features is to improve the user experience, then I say we do not need this.
Let the application developers distinguish their product. ... or, some
developers can release libraries or frameworks which implement commonly needed
behavior.
If there truly is an important feature which cannot be accomplished without
ganging MD units together in a multitimbral MD, then we should examine whether
there is another way. ..
_______________________________________________
coreaudio-api mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives:
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/coreaudio-api
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.