source file: m1446.txt Date: Sat, 13 Jun 1998 10:38:20 -0500 (CDT) Subject: RE: VFX vs. SY77/SY99 From: mr88cet@texas.net (Gary Morrison) >>... but Gary was more interested in the FM synthesis >>side, which uses oscillators (sine wave and variants) as raw material >>for cooking up much more complex sounds. I'm somewhat interested in FM, yes. The idea of resonant filters sweeping through nonharmonic partials strikes me as interesting to explore. But FM in particular isn't a major goal in itself. What I'm more specifically interested in is more abstract sorts of sounds. I've mostly been working with simulations of traditional instruments. I'm interested in composing music approximately in the stylistic vein of W. Carlos' "Timesteps" or "Geodesic Dance". That not in the sense of "knocking off" those particular compositions, or regenerating the particular synthetic sounds used in them. But more generally speaking, I'm interested in a synthesizer for music of more or less that general sort of genre: 1. Abstact, nonacoustic timbres - not imitating anything in particular, or often not even particularly reminiscent of anything immediately recognizable. 2. Although timbres are nonorchestral, the texture and drama of the music IS nevertheless typical of orchestral music. 3. Not spacey in the New-Age sense of the word; it expresses fairly concisely a very specific musical point. 4. Nontraditional to semitraditional form, sometimes a bit programmatic in nature. 5. No underlying "beat", unlike much of Jean-Michel Jarre's music which usually has a steady, quasi-jazz-rockish beat. (Not that there's anything wrong with that pe se, but that's just not what I'm interested in composing for now). 6. Not serial nor minimalistic. Do you folks suppose that a TG77 would be appropriate for that sort of thing? By the way, I'm assuming that the TG77 is multitimbral; is that correct? By "multitimbral", I mean able to play in more than one timbre at a time, typically one per MIDI channel. John (Loffink), that might be a useful column to add to your web page. A fair number of synthesizers are not multitimbral, and I suspect that people would like to know that.