AMIGA-MUSIC
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Chris? Nit? Mr. Picker???
I see lots of postings from you here; I'm gonna reply to them individually
rather than lump the reply all in one.
"Fairly intuitive control mechanism?" Sounds easy, don't it. Actually, if
you're going to do polytonal stuff using a single wavetable, the dynamic
timbre changes sorta come for free. I.E., you've got to recalculate the
table CONSTANTLY to change chords, amplitude envelopes for individual
tones, and such; you might as well do it every millisecond or so and reload
the waveforms with the desired timbre variations.
Actually, creating dynamic timbre, say by additive synthesis in wavetables,
is TRIVIAL compared to trying to do polytonal stuff; and the additive stuff
takes gobs of CPU. I did some work with a 16 harmonic system of my
design… it used a 1K 16 bit wavetable with independant amplitude
envelopes for each harmonic. It was built around a TMS32010 (that's the DSP
chip, not a CPU); if you're familiar with this chip you know it is FAST. It
had problems keeping up! I seriously doubt the 68000 in Ami is capable of
doing even that well, custom chips notwithstanding.
You seem to have a reasonable understanding of the complexities involved;
have you worked with this sort of thing alot? Most people look at the
problems of direct digital synthesis and intuitively see it as a simple
task, but when one actually tries to DO it… Well, you find out that it
is no small task to do it well. This is the reason it's taken VAXes (and
now, dedicated VLSI) to do it so far. Ami is definitely a step in the
right direction, though; I for one am looking forward to what the true
hackers can do with her.