K5synth

A sonic philosophy

I have several conceptual approaches to sound creation and music. While I
don't always live by them, these are what I think about when I contemplate
music and sound.

1. Over the centuries a philosophy of "Mastery" has evolved with regards to
music. I decided to make Additive synthesis and FM synthesis my focus in
sound creation. Thus I have my K3, K5, K5000s, DX7, DX5 and FS1R
synthesizers. Of course, I love other types of synthesis and synthesizers as
well, and frequently use them.

2. I have an interest in the creation of human voice like timbres. I believe
that something in the human voice can directly connect to the listener.
Therefore, creating sounds that have some element of the human voice's
spectrum are of interest to me.

3. Orchestral Synthesis. Here is where the K5 excels, although it is limited
to 15 voices, when 15 voices are layered and detuned on the K5, the sound
can be very rich, and detailed, in the same way that a string section is
rich - something that most other synthesizers (including the K5000s) don't
seem to do very well, even when they allow layering.

4. Evolutionary Sounds, Timbres that Evolve over time: One day as a
teenager, I listened to a radio program that featured sustained electronic
sounds that evolved and changed over time. This got me interested in
creating sounds of this nature.

5. Odd Time Signatures. In most western music, we seem to have fixated on
4/4 and 3/4 as our primary rhythmic structures. While most of the music I
have recorded is indeed in those structures as well, I have been exploring
odd meters such as 7/8, 5/8 and 13/8 in playing improvisational piano music
and hand percussion.

6. Mixture of Electronic, Electric and Acoustic Instruments in compositions.
I believe music frequently has more appeal to the human being when it
contains both acoustic timbres and electronic, than when it contains only
one of these elements.

7. Extended Improvisation .vs. Looping
I believe it is better, and also shows more character as a human being to
record each part in full for a composition than to use loop based tools,
except where the sounds in the loop evolve over time, or have a real musical
purpose for repeating. I don't always live by this but it is my philosophy.

----- Original Message -----
From: "ohsinairam" <ohsinairam@...>
To: <k5synth@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, February 16, 2004 11:59 AM
Subject: [k5synth] Re: What is your sonic philosophy?


> Creating natural sounds using additive synthesis is quite difficult,
> unless you really know about acoustics and have the proper tools.
> spectrum analyzer, etc. Even with a spectrum analyzer, it's tough to
> understand how each harmonic's amplitude evolves in time. Let
> engineers in Kawai do that and make these patches public!
>
> I mainly create artificial sounds on the K5, playing with the DFT
> envelope, LFO, etc. I believe the K5 is fairly good in controlling
> groups of harmonics individually (up to 4 groups), and let them
> evolve using the envelopes. The K5 would be great if it had mode
> polyphony, 16 is not enough. A string patch alone is not fat enough,
> so when you assign 3 strings to a multi and detone them, you eat up
> all your polyphony. Then again, you can use Cubase to record
> individual patches and layer them one on top of the other.
>
>
>
> --- In k5synth@yahoogroups.com, "jbrave" <onephatcat@e...> wrote:
> > Some people are interested in additive synthesis as a way to
> produce sounds
> > in imitation of nature and acoustic instruments. Some are
> interested in
> > creating new sounds that don't occur in nature. I'm interested in
> creating
> > sounds that slowly evolve over time.
> >
> > What types of sounds do you create, and what is your philosophy
> about sound
> > creation?
> >
> > Joel
>
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> Yahoo! Groups Links
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