Fourier Analysis of Intruments

Hey, does anyone know where I can find fourier analyses of instruments? I'm sure it exists, since I can't imagine that every time an additive synthesizer is built, they need to find a pure recording and analyze it.

I'm looking to create a natural sounding, but utterly synthetic, instrument sound for a pD patch I'm working on; sort of like a hoccordolin.

I was looking for something sort of similar a while ago for some reason, and found Greg Sandell's SHARC Timbre Dataset:

"SHARC is a dataset of musical timbre information that I collected by analyzing over 1300 orchestral musical instrument notes. Specifically, the information is amplitude and phase data from a selected steady-state portion of each note. The dataset is now available in XML format."

Assuming no XML-phobia, the data seems usable enough.

However, if your goal is to create something natural-sounding, the exact timbre is probably of comparatively less importance than the way timbre and volume change over time (and that data is not present in SHARC, I think). In practice, I don't think additive synthesis necessarily has an inherent advantage over subtractive or FM synthesis in that respect--your own ability to program it, and especially with a view to envelopes, is more important.

For bottom-up patch building, that is, as opposed to resynthesis of an existing recording. For the latter application, an additive synthesizer with a separate volume envelope for each oscillator can, understandably, be very successful in reproducing pretty much any sound--IIRC the Synclavier, for instance, used additive synthesis rather than sampling. If you want to do anything with the sound, however, I would think that a massive amount of editing is necessary, compared to other methods of synthesis.

Originally Posted by EldKatt

I was looking for something sort of similar a while ago for some reason, and found Greg Sandell's SHARC Timbre Dataset:

"SHARC is a dataset of musical timbre information that I collected by analyzing over 1300 orchestral musical instrument notes. Specifically, the information is amplitude and phase data from a selected steady-state portion of each note. The dataset is now available in XML format."

Assuming no XML-phobia, the data seems usable enough.

However, if your goal is to create something natural-sounding, the exact timbre is probably of comparatively less importance than the way timbre and volume change over time (and that data is not present in SHARC, I think). In practice, I don't think additive synthesis necessarily has an inherent advantage over subtractive or FM synthesis in that respect--your own ability to program it, and especially with a view to envelopes, is more important.

For bottom-up patch building, that is, as opposed to resynthesis of an existing recording. For the latter application, an additive synthesizer with a separate volume envelope for each oscillator can, understandably, be very successful in reproducing pretty much any sound--IIRC the Synclavier, for instance, used additive synthesis rather than sampling. If you want to do anything with the sound, however, I would think that a massive amount of editing is necessary, compared to other methods of synthesis.

This is solid gold, I've been looking for something EXACTLY like this for almost 4 years now.

However, if your goal is to create something natural-sounding, the exact timbre is probably of comparatively less importance than the way timbre and volume change over time (and that data is not present in SHARC, I think). In practice, I don't think additive synthesis necessarily has an inherent advantage over subtractive or FM synthesis in that respect--your own ability to program it, and especially with a view to envelopes, is more important.

Yeah, i find the envelope thing pretty easy in pD, if a bit CPU intensive, and I just can't easily wrap my head around using FM synthesis for everyday stuff. Should do more reading on that.

For bottom-up patch building, that is, as opposed to resynthesis of an existing recording. For the latter application, an additive synthesizer with a separate volume envelope for each oscillator can, understandably, be very successful in reproducing pretty much any sound--IIRC the Synclavier, for instance, used additive synthesis rather than sampling. If you want to do anything with the sound, however, I would think that a massive amount of editing is necessary, compared to other methods of synthesis.

I'm looking for it to react like an instrument would, maybe with different sounds for each register, that sort of thing.

SHARC looks really useful for other stuff though