New Possibilities in Sound Analysis and Synthesis

In this presentation we exemplify the emergence of new possibilities in sound analysis and synthesis with three novel developments that have been done in the Analysis/Synthesis team at IRCAM. These examples address three main activities in our domain, and have reached a large public making or simply listening to music. The first example concerns synthesis using physical models. We have determined the behavior of a class of models, in terms of stability, oscillation, periodicity, and finally chaos, leading to a better control of these models in truly innovative musical applications. The second example concerns additive synthesis essentially based on the analysis of natural sounds. We have developed a new additive method based on spectral envelopes and inverse Fast Fourier Transform, which we name FFT-1 and which provides a solution to the different difficulties of the classical method. Commercial applications are announced for this year, for professional users and soon for a larger