Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by boffinAudio 825 days ago
Yeah, I have a room full of synthesizers, each with their own unique features and engines and workflow.

What I really want is to be able to feed a sample to the AI and have it spit out SYSEX that will reproduce that sample on my room full of synthesizers, so that I can go from Sample->Synthesizable Sound, i.e. turn the static dead of a sample into a dynamic reproduction with hundreds of modifiable parameters.

I'm guessing someone is working on this. Aphex Twin had a cute project along these lines, but I dunno where it went ..
2 comments
dave7 824 days ago
If you aren't familiar with it, Synplant 2 VST does an incredible "sample -> synth patch" for almost any sound you give it
link
boffinAudio 822 days ago
Yes, that is indeed incredible - but I'd love to have the ability to upload an inventory of the synths in my room, and have the AI use any (or all!) of them for reproducing that sample.

I guess we're pretty close to that .. keep an ear out!

link
actionfromafar 825 days ago
Do I understand you right, something like this: "go from sound sample to a bunch of MIDI, each MIDI tuned to each of your synthesizers, which will then reproduce the sample as faithfully as possible" ?

Something like that would indeed be very cool. Hope I understood you correctly.

link
boffinAudio 822 days ago
Yes, exactly. The AI would analyze the sample and then re-create the patches based on the synthesizer engine, in use .. so for example, I give it a sample of a bell, and it goes ahead and reproduces that bell, as close as possible, on the Yamaha DX7 FM engine, meaning that I not only get a playable patch (not a sample, which is often dead-sounding) but can also then alter the parameters using the synth engine itself.

Like I said, Aphex Twin had a project like this a few years back:

https://fo.am/activities/midimutant/

.. but it ran into some limitations - I'd love to see this updated with modern AI techniques.

link