October 3, 2011 Posted by Laurence in Hobbies & Projects, Laurence  Tags: audio, experiment, instrument, Laurence's Lab, Pure Data, synthesis, wavetables

Laurence's Lab: wavetable oscillator synth

This Lab is about an experiment in making a synth based on wavetable oscillators. This was made in the visual programming environment called Pure Data created by Miller Puckette.

Pure Data was created primary to create and manipulate audio, so I spent some time trying to understand synthesis techniques and the basics of generating sound. After building a few things from tutorials (FM synths, filters, effects boxes), I started downloading patches (each program you build in PD is called a "patch") from the Pure Data forum where I'm a member. One of the patches I downloaded was a simple wavetable oscillator where you can draw your own waveform in the table. It was built by Dan Wilcox for his Robot Cowboy project.


click to enlarge
Anyone who has done some kind of electronic music has probably seen these common waveforms/wavetables. These were the basis of most of the music from the video game consoles of the 80's and 90's. There's still a huge community of folks that produce 'chiptune' music based on these waveforms or modified versions of them.

Now, even I don't fully understand all the math and funky algorithms going on behind all that crazyness I built in the video. But thanks to how Pure Data works, I don't need to! I had alot of fun building the synth cause I could snap together different pieces (most of which I made previously) and see out it sounded.

If you're interested in learning more about different synthesis concepts that you can explore in Pure Data, check out the links below:

Programming Electronic music in Pure Data

Obiwannabe's Music Tutorials