Padsynth.md

Padsynth algorithm

Padsynth is an interesting technique to make you timbre alive. It's created by Paul Nasca in his famous synthesizer ZynAddSubFX. It was ported to Csound by Michael Gogins. It requires at least Csound 6.05.

The main idea lies in the notion that all cool sounds are inharmonic. They can be harmonic but there are tiny fluctuations and digressions from the ideal shape. The human ear catches those tiny fluctuations and this what can make a difference between dull digital sound and warm analog sound.

The main idea is to add continuous sidebands to each harmonic, then we can apply invere fourier transform to the spectrum and get inharmonic wave. Then we can write the audio wave to table and play it back with an oscillator. It's going to be periodic. But the period of repetition is quite large (about 5-10 seconds).

So in place of single harmonics we get Gaussian curves with peaks at the given harmonics:

The algorithm is described by the author here.

Also you can read the Csound docs.

The Csound provides only GEN routine to create the PADsynth long ftables. But the algorithm is so much useful that I've decided to supply many more functions to make it easy to create beautiful PADsynth-instruments. There are predefined patches that use the algorithm.

Let's start with simplest functions and then we can dive deeper.

PADsynth standard audio waves

There are versions of standard audio waves: pure sine, triangle, square, sawtooth that are enriched by padsynth algorithm. They have the same prefix bw:

type PadsynthBandwidth = Double

bwOsc, bwTri, bwSqr, bwSaw :: PadsynthBandwidth -> Sig -> SE Sig

The good values for padsynth bandwidth are 0 to 120. When it increases it creates chorus like effect. You can hear the difference between pure sine and sine with bandwidth:

> dac $ osc 220
> dac $ bwOsc 15 220
> dac $ bwOsc 45 220
> dac $ bwOsc 85 220

Let's listen to the saw filtered with moog-like low pass filter:

dac $ at (mlp (2500 * linseg [0, 3, 1, 4, 0]) 0.2) $ bwSaw 45 220

Let's modulate the filter with LFO:

dac $ at (mlp (1500 * utri (2 + 2 * usaw 1)) 0.2) $ bwSaw 65 70

Let's try the same algorithm but with different bandwidth:

dac $ at (mlp (1500 * utri (2 + 2 * usaw 1)) 0.2) $ bwSqr 2 70

There is an oscillator with given list harmonics:

bwOscBy :: PadsynthBandwidth -> [Double] -> Sig -> Sig

Stereo waves

The padsynth algorithm can become more alive and natural when we use separate oscillators for each channel. There are "stereo"-versions for most of padsynth-related functions. So there are stereo oscillators:

bwOsc2, bwTri2, bwSqr2, bwSaw2 :: PadsynthBandwidth -> Sig -> SE Sig

bwOscby2 :: PadsynthBandwidth -> [Double] -> Sig -> SE Sig2

The signals in each channel have different phase. The phase is random for each note.

PADsynth oscillators

There is a generic PADsynth-oscillator:

padsynthOsc :: PadsynthSpec -> Sig -> SE Sig

It takes in padsynth initialization parameters and produces an oscillator. Let's look at those parameters:

-- | Padsynth parameters.
--
-- see for details: <http://csound.github.io/docs/manual/GENpadsynth.html>
data PadsynthSpec = PadsynthSpec
    { padsynthFundamental     :: Double
    , padsynthBandwidth       :: Double
    , padsynthPartialScale    :: Double
    , padsynthHarmonicStretch :: Double
    , padsynthShape           :: PadsynthShape
    , padsynthShapeParameter  :: Double
    , padsynthHarmonics       :: [Double]
    } deriving (Show, Eq)

data PadsynthShape = GaussShape | SquareShape | ExpShape

Wow! Lots of parameters.

• Fundamental -- is the frequency of the note that is stored in the table.

• Bandwidth -- is the bandwidth of harmonic. How wide we should spread the harmonics.

• PartialScale -- Is the ratio with which we increase the bandwidth for each subsequent harmonic. There is a notion that for the sound to sound natural the bandwidth should become bigger when we go from lower harmonics to higher. This parameter declares

• HarmonicStretch -- ratio of stretch of the overtones

• Shape -- shape of the single harmonic (gaussian, square or exponential)

• ShapeParameter -- shape parameter of the curve.

• Harmonics -- list of relative amplitudes of the partials

There seems to be too many parameters to set! But there is a handy function to set reasonable defaults:

defPadsynthSpec :: Double -> [Double] -> PadsynthSpec

It requires only bandwidth and harmonics. Also you can modify some parameters like this:

> (defPArameters 45 [1, 0.5, 0.1]) { padsynthPartialScale  = 2.3  }

Let's listen to the sound of some harmonics:

> let wave cps = padsynthOsc (defPadsynthSpec 25 [1, 0.5, 0, 0.2]) cps
> dac $ at (mlp (150 + 2500 * uosc 0.25) 0.1) $ wave $ constSeq [110, 137, 165, 220] 6

We modify the center frequency of moogladder low-pass filter with LFO. The frequency is created with running sequence of four notes.

It's useful to be able to assign different harmonic content to different regions of frequencies. We can do it with :

padsynthOscMultiCps :: [(Double, PadsynthSpec)] -> D -> SE Sig
padsynthOscMultiCps specs frequency = ...

The list of pairs contains thresholds for frequencies and padsynth specifications. The given padsynth specification is going to be applied to all notes with frequencies that are below the given threshold and above of the threshold of the previous element in the list.

There is a function that can apply different padsynth specs according to the value of the amplitude.

padsynthOscMultiVol :: [(Double, PadsynthSpec)] -> (D, Sig) -> SE Sig
padsynthOscMultiVol specs (amplitude, frequency) = ...

There are stereo versions of the padsynth oscillators:

padsynthOsc2 :: PadsynthSpec -> Sig -> SE Sig2

padsynthOscMultiCps2 :: [(Double, PadsynthSpec)] -> D -> SE Sig2

padsynthOscMultiVol2 :: [(Double, PadsynthSpec)] -> (D, Sig) -> SE Sig2

Low level PADsynth table generator

If the default oscillators are not good for you and you want to implement your own you may beed to create the padsynth ftable first. It's not that hard to do if we understand the PadsynthSpec data type (see prev section).

We can create a table with a following function:

padsynth :: PadsynthSpec -> Tab

PADsynth instruments

The package csound-catalog contains many predefined instruments that are based on padsynth algorithm. They take in a spectrum of Sharc instrument and create a padsynth instrument with it:

psOrganSharc :: SharcInstr -> Patch2
psPianoSharc :: SharcInstr -> Patch2
psPadSharc :: SharcInstr -> Patch2
psSoftPadSharc :: SharcInstr -> Patch2

There are about 30 predefined sharc instruments. The sharc instrument contains spectrum of some orchestral instrument. You can find the full list of sharc instruments in the module Csound.Patch (Section Sharc instruments > Concrete instruments)

Let's listen to some of them (recall that we need to import the Csound.Patch module to use the predefined patches):

> :m +Csound.Patch
> vdac $ mul 0.5 $ atMidi $ psSoftPadSharc shAltoFlute
> vdac $ mul 0.5 $ atMidi $ psOrganSharc shCello
> vdac $ mul 0.5 $ atMidi $ psPiano shTrumpetC

The timbre of an instrument can be altered by changing the bandwidth of padsynth. There are special versions of aforementioned functions that allows to alter specific parameters (The function name stays the same but it's followed by ').

data PadSharcSpec = PadSharcSpec {
        padSharcBandwidth :: Double,
        padSharcSize      :: Int
    }

psPadSharc' :: PadSharcSpec -> SharcInstr -> Patch2

The type PadSharcSpec is defined in the module Csound.Catalog.Wave (see SHARC section). It contains two parameters:

• Bandwidth -- bandwidth for padsynth ftables

• Size -- number of frequency regions (1 to 40)

The size determines how many tables are going to be used. The default is 15.

There is an instance of Default class for PadSharcSpec:

instance Default PadSharcSpec where
    def = PadSharcSpec 15 8

So if we want to alter only bandwidth we can do it like this:

vdac $ atMidi $ psSoftPadSharc' (def { padSharcBandwidth = 56 }) shAltoFlute

There are many more functions they are related to altering reverb effect for the instruments and the number of frequency regions. We can increase the number of regions if we use the suffix Hifi:

vdac $ atMidi $ psLargeOrganSharcHifi shAltoFlute

Deep pads

The padsynth algorithm is super cool for creation of pads. There are predefined functions that create great pads. They have vedic names:

vibhu, rishi, agni, prakriti, rajas, avatara, bhumi :: PadsynthBandwidth -> Patch2

The only argument is the bandwidth for underlying tables.

You can try them out:

> dac $ atMidi $ vibhu 35
> dac $ atMidi $ vibhu 0.6

You can switch dac to vdac if you don't have the real hardware midi device attached to your computer.

Pads with crossfades

There are cool instruments that allow to morph between several timbres. Right now they are defined only for pads. They have got suffix Cfd for morphing of two timbres and Cfd4 for morphing four timbres:

psPadSharcCfd :: Sig -> SharcInstr -> SharcInstr -> Patch2
psPadSharcCfd cfdLevel instr1 instr2 = ...

psPadSharcCfd4 :: Sig -> Sig -> SharcInstr -> SharcInstr -> SharcInstr -> SharcInstr -> Patch2
psPadSharcCfd4 cfdLevelX cfdLevelY instr1 instr2 instr3 instr4 = ...

The cfdLevel lies in the interval (0, 1). The 0 produces only first instrument and the 1 produces only second instrument. So we have the mixture of two timbres. Also we can create the mixture of four signals. But in this case we have two levels: cfdLevelX and cfdLevelY. We can imagine that timbres lie at the corners of the rectangle. The levels define the coordinates of the point that lies inside the rectangle. The output timbre is produced with bilinear interpolation of timbres that lie at the corners of the rectangle. The values for levels lie at the interval (0, 1). The 0 means left corner (or bottom) and 1 stands for right corner (or top corner).

Let's create a simple crossfade pad:

vdac $ atMidi $ psPadSharcCfd (uosc 0.25) shAltoFlute shCello

reminder: the uosc produces unipolar sine wave with given frequency.

There are many more functions. They have different prefixes:

psSoftPadSharcCfd, psDeepPadSharcCfd, psDeepSoftPadSharcCfd, ...

See the full list at the module Csound.Patch.

Also there are deep pads with corssfades:

vedicPadCfd :: Sig -> SharcInstr -> SharcInstr -> PadsynthBandwidth -> Patch2
vedicPadCfd cfdLevel instr1 instr2 bandwidth = ...

vedicPadCfd4 :: Sig -> Sig -> SharcInstr -> SharcInstr -> SharcInstr -> SharcInstr -> PadsynthBandwidth -> Patch2
vedicPadCfd4 cfdLevelX cfdLevelY instr1 instr2 instr3 instr4 bandwidth = ...

They are particularly useful to test timbres with different values for bandwidth (it's the last input argument). Good values lie at the interval (0.01, 130).

There are crossfade versions of specific pads: vibhuRishi, vibhuAgni, rishiPrakriti and so on. They take in the bandwidth and crossfade level:

> dac $ mul 2 $ vibhuRajas 45 (uosc 0.25)

Also we can use a randomized signal to control the crossfade level:

> dac $ do { k <- 0.5 + jitter 0.5 0.1 0.2;  mul 2 $ atMidi $ vibhuRajas 65 k }

We can create a timbral shimmer effect if we increase the rate of randomized crossfade level:

> dac $ do { k <- 0.5 + jitter 0.5 1 8;  mul 2 $ atMidi $ vibhuRajas 65 k }

Padsynth and noise

we can make the pad more interesting if we add some noise. There are two predefined patches that illustrate this idea: noisyRise and noisySpiral:

> vdac $ atMidi noisyRise
> vdac $ atMidi noisySpiral

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