Is it possible to synthesize sounds no one has heard?

[JohnChips]

Or have we heard them all? What do you guys think about this and what is required electronically/technically to come up with a cool sound no one has heard before?

I feel most sounds we dont hear in music often are rare because they sound unpleasant to most ears. But creating a sound never heard before which are actually pleasant enough to use is a different story.

Thoughts?

[Mardi Gras]

in short i'd say we've heard them all before.

Sounds are just groups of sine waves all put together that make complex waveforms.

Of course its possible to make a synth patch thats totally original and fresh but it will be build on the foundations of complex waveforms (saws squares etc) that we will all have heard before

[bitleyTM]

Of course. That's what synths really are made to do. :-)

[Space Station]

All sound is derived from sine waves. So maybe a certain mixture of sine waves hasn't been heard before..like me saying flibonyeeefunyploop with a slight flange on it for instance or an alien farting..

[MadforBrad]

is it possible to make new words. Nope.

[JohnChips]

Originally Posted by bitleyTM

Of course. That's what synths really are made to do. :-)

Uh, you make it sound so easy to come up with something unique...since when are synths made for that reason? To me it seems all of them are used to build up on sine wave sounds (as stated previously) so I dont see how making things we HAVEN'T heard is what they "really are made to do".

[Eric J]

No.

[Jomox]

Yes it's very possible. It's all about experimenting, lots of FX can aid you into creating something different such as vapor synths/fx.

[Myrok Rolles]

the possibility of new unique sounds are only limited to the physical capacity of air to be disturbed, and the physical capacity of our audio reciptors (ears) to interpret these dist

Since we know that air can be disturbed in almost infinite ways, we know there is a seemingly infinite number of unique vibrating patterns.

Throw in the fact that complex disturbances are valid sounds, and you get infinite possibilites x infinite possibilites = infinite ^ infinite possibilites.

how do you get new sounds?

Processing, processing processing.

expirementation, creativity.

Combining more than one original sound and creating complex sounds.


remember: sound is just air being disturbed.. a saw wave disturbs air differently than a sin wave, or a square wav, etc... which results in our ear interpreting the disturbances as different sounds.

since every little bit of DSP changes the way that the air is disturbed, your options are limitless.

dont be fooled by the "we've already heard it all" idea

[stinkyfingers]

hell yeah to this guy ^
and everyone's ears are different so nothing sounds exactly the same to everyone...etc...

[Dubtek71]

Originally Posted by JohnChips

Or have we heard them all? What do you guys think about this and what is required electronically/technically to come up with a cool sound no one has heard before?

I feel most sounds we dont hear in music often are rare because they sound unpleasant to most ears. But creating a sound never heard before which are actually pleasant enough to use is a different story.

Thoughts?

Well to create new sounds isn't hard electronically. Give me a hand held recorder. Walk around a bit downtown or where ever, today tomorrow and the day after. Dump it, process it ,resample it add effects. And away you go. Actually in another thread I had asked about using a modular synth w/ 4 external ins to process samples. So there is another way one might create the the sound never heard before.

Matthew Herbert made an album called Bodily Functions. Guess what he used to make the record!?!?

[DarkPlasma]

Absolutely!

[seen-da-sizer]

New sounds, easy!!! Having them musical or being able to put them into a musical context is hard, and this is an art!

[The Architecture]

its called Anti synthesis :P, plenty of new sounds to be found there.

[boon]

Originally Posted by MadforBrad

is it possible to make new words. Nope.

new words get added to the dictionary every year.

[JohnChips]

Originally Posted by MadforBrad

is it possible to make new words. Nope.

Wow that's dumb...words like Google lol chillax and bromance were added last year...how can you not make new words? You string together letters in different combinations that haven't been used before.

Wtf? That's so irrelevant.

Sound is harder, if you piece together 2 old sounds to make a new one and they don't blend well, someone can usually just realize the two sounds separately.

[seen-da-sizer]

Originally Posted by boon

new words get added to the dictionary every year.

Originally Posted by JohnChips

Wow that's dumb...words like Google lol chillax and bromance were added last year...how can you not make new words? You string together letters in different combinations that haven't been used before.

And I thought MadforBrad was just sarcastic, silly me.

[JohnChips]

Sarcasm over the internet goes through SO well am I right.

question marks suck

[zosthegoatherd]

Originally Posted by Dubtek71

Matthew Herbert made an album called Bodily Functions. Guess what he used to make the record!?!?

I prefer Aesthetic Meat Front's embalmer tapes... Corpses sound neeto

[Dubtek71]

Originally Posted by zosthegoatherd

I prefer Aesthetic Meat Front's embalmer tapes... Corpses sound neeto

Oh well that is something... I will have to check it out. Sounds uhh cheery yeah!

[sirdss]

Why limit ourselves to just air?

How about putting an amp and microphone in a sealed airtight chamber then replacing the air with lets say helium and record the results!

[cixelsyd]

The issue for me isn't really isn't about whether the sound palette is infinite, it's more about using sound in a musical context and this is where I think alot of sounds become unusable and not necessarily because they aren't usable but maybe we aren't used to hearing some sounds in a musical context.

[greggybud]

Isn't that what a synth is all about?

In the 70's everyone grew tired of that boring Moog sound and where trying to push analog synths to emulate real instruments. Everyone tried to emulate strings. Out of that we got really cool stuff like an Arp Solina.

In the 80's we got digital and sampling which allowed much closer emulation of real instruments. At least the DX7 did some pretty close things. Also with the Fairlight, NED or Ensoniq Mirrage...which ever you could afford, we got the sampled voice ie vox sounds which to me at least were totally new and unique...and of course overused.

In the 90's we got endless boring romplers, some with micro-displays containing 50 menus and 300 sub-menus..all trying to perfect a closer natural sound. Isn't this where the backlash began and we started to re-think the purpose of a syntheiszer? By the end of the 90s soft synths became available. NI released a combination of Generator and Transformator that became Reaktor. Once again I discovered new sounds with great factory ensembles plus hundreds of user ensembles.

As far as new sounds not heard before, Reaktor was the way to go because it was so deep and flexible. If you want to explore new sounds I can't think of any better software than Reaktor (keep in mind ensembles that can sample) used with Kore2 for mostly morphing purposes plus integrating any 3rd party VSTI's into the picture.

Of course the greater challenge is integrating these new sounds into a song and making it work.

[apolo]

There is no dictionary with already heard sounds...! How would you know nobody has heard it...?

[synthguy]

Originally Posted by zosthegoatherd

I prefer Aesthetic Mea ont's mer tap tot Fr pes Cor und nee embal ses so...

*puts hatchet down and wipes hands* Even if that was sarcasm, that was wrong in every way conceivable... anyhow...

Isao Tomita created just about every class of synthesized sound on his Moog Modular III back in the '70s. He invented the pad sound, and used the oscillators and synth channels of that classic modular to fuse partial-like voices into huge, complex patches. I honestly have heard very few sounds, noises, whatever, which haven't already been painted around by Tomita.

Having said that though, he just mapped out much of the terrain. Within these regions, we have all kinds of sonic possibilities yet to realize. Jens Johansson, Jordan Rudess and others are creating leads, pads, basses, keyboards, pluck sounds and noises that people are dying to recreate on their synths. Eric Persing created what became "fondly" known as the Hoover patch on an a-Juno 2, and there are all kinds of patches in the techno, house and electronica field that people are chasing these days. Trent Reznor and Prince are opposite ends of the spectrum, but have a similar philosophy of trying anything and everything, creating sounds that no one else comes close to but everyone wants.

I've taken a cue from Sting who listened to no new music for a year - if not all music period - while working out ideas for the Syncronicity album. I'll sporadically tip my ears into some streaming net station for a while, or play a favorite CD, but other than that I'm fussing with my synths or thinking through things in my head. When I program, I usually try for something different, and have a few romplers on hand so I have a wide range of waveforms to mix and filter. I'm not as adventurous as Trent, but I stumble into some neat sounds now and then.

There are all kinds of things you can try. Some patch editors have randomizers, which even include filters and range settings to keep things from going completely nuts. And you can always just play with settings and then hearing what happens.

Have fun, make sounds! See what happens!

[zosthegoatherd]

Originally Posted by synthguy

*puts hatchet down and wipes hands* Even if that was sarcasm, that was wrong in every way conceivable... anyhow...

Not sarcasm, Embalmer Tapes is one of my fav albums

Aesthetic Meat Front- Embalmer Tapes | Grave Concerns Ezine

I suppose the sounds are somewhat similar to sounds that could come from another source.

I would actually worry about running out of combinations of notes (at least using western notes) that have not been written yet before running out of possible sounds, or combinations of sounds.

[bensaddiction]

Subtractive has probably run its course

But look at all of that paul-stretch extreme time stretching stuff last year

Granular & sample based is where its at

[poserp]

Yes, that's why I program, and why I use a Kurzweil. It does, and can do, new classes of synthesis.

Mathematically the answer is yes. Although I'm not sure what order of infinity is involved, it is at least the same order as the whole numbers, and probably the irrationals.

Also, just because you can break any function down into sine waves doesn't mean we've heard it all before. That's a bit like saying that we've seen every person because we can sequence DNA.

[Ghosty Dog]

Originally Posted by JohnChips

.... what is required electronically/technically to come up with a cool sound no one has heard before?

An instrument, some filters/patch parameters to apply to the sound, a little technical knowledge in using it, and equally important, imagination and time to play.

Originally Posted by JohnChips

I feel most sounds we dont hear in music often are rare because they sound unpleasant to most ears. But creating a sound never heard before which are actually pleasant enough to use is a different story.
Thoughts?

I don't know about unpleasant. Perhaps non-standard sounds are, as someone here suggested, just a bit more difficult to put into a musical context. I expect no-one will have 'heard' before, several of the sounds I use in these two pieces.
I was playing around with loops and filters, and came up with a totally unorthadox rhythmic sound I used throughout this piece (right channel). http://soundcloud.com/ghosty-dog/order-decay

And I'm proud of the two rare sound motifs I used that complete this piece too - the first one beginning at 10secs and is intermittent throughout, the 2nd only comes in at 3:50 and 4:10.
http://soundcloud.com/ghosty-dog/the-question

[atma]

never! 100 years from now people will still be using shitty wavetable vsts to make dubstep wobbles!