And I have learned the wrong language!
1 Like
You are still on time! Catalan is easy-peasy 
@riban and @jofemodo. Great demo from our men in Barcellona. Thought there was just enough venue appropriate music to back up the demo speel.
3 Likes
Rumours, rumours, rumoursā¦
Hi, zynthianers!
Probably you know that a contest is ON. The prize: a fantastic V5 prototype.
With that particular panorama right in front of my eyes, I had to take a break from the book that I am currently writing, to compose a song.
The big draw in addition to its new V5 powers, is the least that deserve! DonĀ“t you think so?
I invite you all to listen, hope you like itā¦
5 Likes
A special meeting of the Zynth Club to do some actual zynth related stuffā¦
I would like to have a chat about some design ideas and what better place than our non-judgemental, friendly club house? Specifically, I want to talk about how audio clip sequencing might best be implemented. This is a subject that has been discussed before but it may actually become a reality if you help me to design itā¦
So letās meet up and talk about this and other rubbish. How about 18:00 UTC Monday 26th June 2023. (That is 7pm UK time.) I can be flexible so please say if a better time / date suits you.
Ok then
I can make it then. Might be worthwhile publicising it a bit more or using it to refine ideas or a framework for a broader discussion.
With such a global attendance it is challenging to schedule a good start time but letās make it an hour later to allow a touch more beauty sleep for those who need it 
.
So we will start at 19:00 UTC.
In an unusually Zynthian focused meeting there were only a few deviations which included:
- Red Hat are within their rights to charge users to access source code
ā¦but in Zynthian news:
- @riban demonstrated the V5 in the style of a Sonar demo
- This included demonstrating new features added since Sonar - progress is swift!
- The audio player has many new cool features (check it out in testing branch or wait a short while to experience it in stable)
- These include:
- Zoom waveform
- Crop playable range (in / out points) with shading of waveform indication
- Adjustable loop range (maybe not the newest feature but still quite cool)
- ADSR amplitude envelope (when triggered from MIDI)
- Pitchbend with configurable range (when triggered from MIDI)
- Selectable info overlay to show: clip duration, play position, remaining play time, loop duration, samplerate or hide info
- Different colour backgrounds for each track of multi-track recordings
- Hereās a pretty picture showing some of these features
- How might we add looping audio to ZynPad to complement its MIDI sequencer?
- Keep it simple for users, having default config / workflow that provides core functionality
- Avoid artificial limitations and aim for flexibility of technical or workflow constraints
- Assign pads to chains (currently assigned to MIDI channels) so that they continue to behave as MIDI sequences for MIDI instruments but act as audio clip players for audio player chains
- Clip players can be monophonic and offer mutually exclusive trigger and playback from pads assigned to the same player / chain
- Provide better visual / navigational linking between pads and mixer strips (chains)
- Allow selection of audio files from UI, preferably with some form of filtering / categorisation
- Allow upload and assignment of audio files from webconf
- Use existing (and possibly additional) ZynPad play modes to define behaviour of clip playback
- Automatically adjust raw audio to fit tempo without changing pitch
- It may be advantageous to have a playback mode that adjusts pitch / playback speed to match tempo - similar to vari-speed
- Try to automatically define the beats in an audio clip and allow user to manually override
- Allow user to change groove of a clip by moving the beats around, e.g. quantise, swing, trigger from sequence, etc.
- It is likely that users will expect (and certainly deserve) to have some audio clips available in the box which may require effort (from you lovely community?) to create them because many (most / all?) publicly available clips have constraints on redistribution
- Adventure Kid Waveforms provides freely distributable short samples (effectively waveforms) that can be used by audio playermore like an instrument than a clip player
- It feels like a fair constraint that each player works at one time signature, i.e. that all clips within a player have a length with a common division, e.g. 4 beats, 8 beats, 12 beats, etc.
- The existing audio player (which is far more feature rich than initially envisage) provides many of these features and could be expanded / modified to act as the playback engine for audio clips
I will copy some of this to the thread relating to audio clip playing. It was a really good meeting with a great bunch of guys all willing to listen and exchange ideas. There was a fair amount of enthusiasm for the idea - we just need to find some poor sod to do the workā¦ 
4 Likes
Shall we meet again? One evening next week - letās say Tuesday 18th? Any takers or alternative suggestions?
1 Like
Sounds good to me.
1 Like
Iām up for it.
Suits me. I will be there at 19:00 UTC but feel free to start earlier to suit UK summer time.
Okay, 19:00 UTC tonight, That is just under two and a half hours from now.
Piano Forte mentioned by @Baggypants looks interesting. I have been doing a bit of research on audio classification that draws on a body of work around deep learning for speech recognition which can be applied to instruments and biological sounds.
There are some similarities between these audio classification methods and the human biological hearing system to acquire amplitude/time, convert into spectral time components (sonograms) in the cochlea and the cognitive processing around detecting the changes in these spectral components (spectrotemporal modulation power spectrum) that is human hearing.
3 Likes
Thank you @pac_71 
Very interesting stuff and staff, so to speak 
.
These guys seem to have a strong academic background, and a pleasantly forward-looking approach.
I will have a try at PianoForte, obviously keeping in mind that - for all of their admirable scientific cleverness - some mathematical models of acoustic instruments keep on sounding quite artificial, at least for the time being. The resiliently plasticky middle-range of the otherwise valuable Pianoteq 8 stands as a clear demonstration, of such yet hard to overcome limits.
We all hope that the contribution of deep-learning to the cause, and thus the adaptive simulation of the listening-perceptual level (in place of the classic spectral modeling strategy), will allow for a long awaited quantum leap in real-time synthesis.
As a choral composer, I am looking forward to the day the combined critical mass of AI/neural learning and computational power of an upper order of magnitude will afford a truly human-sounding synthesised choir, with full multi-language speech capability (not the current bazillion-bytes sampled libraries of disconnected phonemes, or the Yamaha forays into cheesy Manga voices).
Let us see where this will lead: in the meantime, the good folks at Omnes Sonos declare to have a singing voice instrument in future development!
1 Like
Hey now, Iām currently in the process of trying to buy a Yamaha Vocaloid VKB-100!
Hi @Baggypants, good luck with that!
I can say, to a good degree of assuredness, that I have tried almost everything which came up, in the field of simulating an ensemble of voices by electronic means.
By now, I have settled with a massive Spitfire instrument for composition/auditing, and with a now discontinued Bohemian choral tool with true word-building, for realistic output.
It is not perfect and toilsome, but delivers the right tone for my needs, and overall the best results I have been able to detect around, while still entailing a reasonably manageable workflow.
The Vocaloid-like formant synthesisers are of little use for rendering classically-rooted compositions, because they sound quite artificial and robotic, to the extent of being funny/nasal/chipmonk, which is perfectly legitimate if that is the result one is aiming at!
Best!
1 Like
This is exactly my speed. I need something to compliment my natural singing voice
1 Like
