I went on a tear the other day, after finding out what wavetable synthesis actually does – I’d always vaguely assumed it was just another kind of sample playback, and wasn’t interested. A few hours of python later, I have a little program that goes mining through my music library, hunting for interesting waveforms; a little normalization and some spectral morphing later, and out come a bunch of wavetables, like you’d use in Serum or Massive .
The machine proceeds to use its wavetables, in a barely controlled sort of let’s-just-see-what-happens way, to generate anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes of… well… let’s call it “sound”. It’s terrible, most of the time, admittedly – but it is a surprising kind of sound, too, and worth the exploration, for the compelling bits of alien music that sometimes come blurting out of that weird robot’s brain; dark throbbing rhythmic gritty off-kilter stuff that I would never have imagined making on purpos
I had a few ideas for ways I might try to control this novel instrument – following the envelope or pitch of one sound to drive the generation of another, perhaps – so I went to look at the state of the music-analysis world, imagining I’d find some envelope-follower algorithm and do some stuff with FFTs.