vink
atropos-krans-os
Ik heb hem gekocht. Ik vind hem super! het heeft nu een introductie prijs van +-67 euro (-40%). Het gaat niet heel diep qua mogelijkheden maar het is ontzettend creatief bedacht, toch wel een synth met een eigen smoel. Inderdaad een stuk of 2000 timbres (gekleurde bolletjes), en daarmee kan je een combinatie maken dmv de bolletjes op een lijn te plaatsen en de posities van de bolletjes bepalen je sound en kan je ook moduleren, de nodige LFO's en ADSR modulatie is vrij uitgebreid, uitstekende FX mogelijkheden voor lange reverbs, delays en mooie phase effecten, de Dirt knop maakt je sound echt vies. Overigens lijkt het alsof het door of voor Roli zelf is gemaakt, zo mooi is het geintegreerd. Het is echt gemaakt voor drones, ambient sounds en pads en je hebt al snel een mooie zelf gemaakt. CPU trekt het ook makkelijk, en dat voor behoorlijk epische soundscapes, dat krijg ik in bijv. Pigments of Phase Plant niet voor elkaar. Tot nu toe erg blij mee en heb zelfs al een sound in mijn nieuwste track toegevoegd.
Peter V heeft op KVR gereageerd hoe, Abyss werkt; ik "citeer";
"Every single tone-colour is a spectral model. These models have been derived from natural samples. This has a couple of benefits: the models capture the fluctuations of natural sounds, hence they sound very organic and have a nice texture. At the same time they are not fixed samples, but can be modified. In the current version you can add / remove detail, add "musical" noise which is specifically tuned to the tonecolour, increase the fluctuations or make the sound static like an oscillator voice. This is just the tip of the iceberg - the models are quite flexible and other parameters may be added in later versions (if there is interest). The underlying spectral model used in Abyss is based on my own research and is in many aspects different from the usual "STFT" or harmonic+noise+residual approaches.
Careful listeners here in the forum suspected that the engine is based on samples. That is also true to some extent: the spectral model is quite CPU intensive, but I wanted Abyss to be less demanding on CPU. Hence when you click / select any tone-colour the spectral model is rendered into a multisample, so when playing the synth these multi-samples are played back. With more and more CPU available I will at some point extend the technology to work directly on the spectral models. This will allow realtime modulations of the spectral model. But you can achieve this with ease in Abyss already today: simply put multiple variations of tone colours on the gradient - there is no practical limit on how many tone-colours you place on the gradient. In practice I have rarely needed more than a handful tone colours to make even the smoothest transitions.
The tone-colours are sorted into the 2D "surf" area with help of an "artificial hearing model". Based on this model sounds that are similar are placed close to each other and also have similar tone colour. However, your inner representation of sounds is not two dimensional! Actually the way our ears and brains resolve and understand timbre is quite amazing and fascinating topic, and an active area of research. We know for sure that our inner representation of sound has at least 20 dimensions, probably more. So any projection onto two or three dimensions will necessarily place different tone colours close to each other. This is bad for scientific approach of remodelling sound, but for creative sound design I think it is even a feature: the 2D map _roughly_ places similar timbres in proximity, but not with mathematical precision, hence you have many pleasant surprises. Also "surfing" the map is so speedy that you can "browse" through dozens of sounds in matter of seconds, which is fun and effective at the same time.
I hope this demystifies the technology. There will be an "ask me anything" livestream on Wednesday 7th July - feel free to join and ask more questions!"