Bend your sound: Harmonic Resynthesis

One of the main problems you’ll find with sampling, past the initial excitement, is that you often want to build a coherent /cohesive sound out of many different samples but the samples cannot be modified as fluidly as you’d like, and not in the context of an instrument. While you can use the traditional resampling to adjust the pitch of a sound, after that the timing of the sample will also be changed. Or imagine you have two wonderful vibrato flute samples, but the vibrato speeds don’t really match...or you have a piano sample which you think sounds a little too much like a harpsichord and you’d like it to sound more like a grand piano. Sometimes you also have the inverse problem: samples are too similar and you need to differentiate them in order to create a sense of more breath, variety and dynamics.

Previously, applications have allowed you to change some properties of sounds, as pitch and time,  but only one sample at a time. Traditionally you have to use time-stretching algorithms and/or plugins to do this destructively for each sample file, and then reassemble the whole instrument and hope that it plays they way you imagined. This approach is inefficient and can kill creativity and experimentation.

Harmonic Resynthesis (HR) is a Keymap technology for manipulating pitch, time, formant and amplitude of samples in the context of entire sampler instruments in a simple and intuitive way. The same way movies use computer graphics to create realistic scenes that would be otherwise impossible to shoot, Harmonic Resynthesis works by analyzing your samples, and creating in realtime new sounding samples using the original as a basis.

Polyphonation

In the instrument editor, you can use the Harmonic Resynthesis DSP technology available in Keymap, to polyphonate a sample. In other words you can load a sample and build re-synthesized versions of it for the two surrounding octaves. The polyphonated Zones will play for the same exact amount of time, so that you can very easily use this to create harmonies of spoken words, or other similar applications where you are stuck with very few samples and you want intermediate samples too.

New Resynthesis Algorithm for drums and polyphonic phrases

A new resynthesis algorithm let you use many of the Harmonic Resynthesis features also on non-harmonic samples as drum loops or polyphonic sampled phrases.

The algorithm can be used to polyphonate any sample, i.e. spread it at different pitches but same duration over the keyboard

How you use it

For each of the four main Harmonic Synthesis sound property parameters, you can directly draw and edit envelopes to achieve the exact result you want. When you change the Time envelope, you will not actually be seeing a change in the length of the sample on screen, but you will see that the playback cursor will smoothly change its speed to follow the envelope.

As another example, the amplitude envelope is not a volume-change control, but the real, final, volume of the sample for each point.  You are not limited to changing the whole sample length, but you can speed up or down an attack in a subtle way, smooth a vibrato or correct the sample amplitude only where you need it, directly draw the shape of your drum loops on screen, or freeze the decay in a sample, or…. do you get the idea?  Harmonic Resynthesis offers an immense range of applications!

Editing of  HR envelopes is done either by drawing with the mouse or by using tools that allow you to expand or reduce the effect, grab and smear the envelope, or smoothly reset the envelope to its original shape. While this is extremely flexible, we also added parameters to let you perform common tasks as pitch correction or normalization in realtime.