The Featsynth Framework for Feature-Based synthesis: Design and Applications

This paper describes the FeatSynth framework, a set of open-source C++ classes intended to make it as easy as possible to integrate feature-based synthesis techniques into audio software. We briefly review the key ideas behind feature-based synthesis, and then discuss the framework’s architecture. We emphasize design choices meant to make the framework more flexible and straightforward to use. A number of illustrative examples of applications and tools developed using FeatSynth are presented to highlight different ways in which the API can be used. These examples include a command-line system for performing (among other things) offline non-phonorealistic analysis-synthesis transformations, a system allowing users to interactively manipulate the feature values used to control synthesis, and a ChucK FeatSynth plugin making use of the new “Chugin” ChucK plugin framework. The framework can be downloaded from http://featsynth.cs.princeton.edu.