theories about analog sound

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godzilla
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theories about analog sound

Post by godzilla » Fri May 05, 2006 10:50 am

i was talking to someone about robots/3D representations of the human form, the other day and they said that the more realistically human the robot/figure is the more positively people respond to it until it starts getting too real.

think of it as a graph with "realism of artificial human" at 1 axis and "positivity of human response" on the other axis. the line keeps increasing with a real human interaction being the end of the line but just before that there is a huge dip where people get afraid of less than perfect humans. something about being so close to a human that you couldn't tell otherwise and the omition of a soul or whatever.

but i was thinking maybe that's why we all prefer to use analog synths rather than digital samples, if i needed piano in one of my songs (but couldn't use a real piano for some reason) i would much rather create a synth sound that has similar characteristics to a piano (but doesn't pretend to be one) on an analog synth, than use a digital sample.

yeah just thought i'd share my thoughts :wink:

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Post by theglyph » Fri May 05, 2006 2:38 pm

That's an interesting theory!

I think that analog's contiuous nature is what draws the ear in more favorably over digital's discrete nature.

This could howvever tie into your idea. Real instruments can be sampled at high enough rates that the digitized signals graph would approach a continuous form. The same with humanized robots. If proper skin texture and enough actuators were used the look, feel and movement would approach that of a real human.

The question here would be wether the person listening to the sample or interacting with the robot has prior knowledge of its true nature. If we do, is it in our nature to reject something that we know isn't natural even if we would percieve it to be so blindly? With robots I feel that there is a creepy factor (Hello Dave!!) once they begin to approach the real deal.

I often think about Arturia's Moog emulations and wonder if I Judge the Real Minis to sound better simply because I can't accept that a CD/DVD can generate sounds as well as real analog circuits no matter how close they get to the real thing.

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Post by The Unknown » Fri May 05, 2006 3:02 pm

I think this is absolutely right, with regard to both robots and anologue synth sounds. Eighties synths which tried (far too hard) to sound like the real instruments they were emulating, sound really quite bland by comparison, nowadays. They also discouraged creativity, by offering banks of presets that sounded so good (at the time), nobody bothered to program their own. I particularly remember the Roland D50's "Fantasia" appearing on countless records in it's day. To me, it is the very fact that anologue sounds are unlike anything an accoustic instrument can produce that makes them interesting.

Quite like to have a robot like the ones from the iRobot film though - that would be seriously cool!
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Post by museslave » Fri May 05, 2006 6:36 pm

I would put forth that the favouring of analog sound over digital stems from something a little more simplistic: that the human ear is simply capable of discerning analog from digital (in many cases), and the human ear favours the analog because it is more similar to acoustic sound than digital is. I know this is, at first, quite a supposition... but the fact is that many or most people, even laymen, favor analog over digital.
Of course, a lot of it exists in the mind of the listener, and is based upon the associations they have built concering both varieties of sound. There are digital sounds that I like that cannot be created by analog synthesizers... but if they COULD, I suspect i would favour the analog version for the above reason.
As for instrument emulation... I'm a firm believer that analog synthesizers were not intended to emulate acoustic sounds, and only were able to at first because acoustic sounds had never been emulated before. As for digital emulation, acoustic sounds are always better. As for sampling, I'll take the real thing over the sample, but sometimes the samples are adequate.
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Post by Indeed » Sat May 06, 2006 12:46 am

then there is the artform aspect of sampling. sure, if you're gonna compose a fugue or something like that, you want live instruments. But for hiphop production, or creating new forms of music, sampling alone is an awesome mode. there's also the whole thing with the lo-fi samplers of old. I think there's also a pull to the gritty crunchiness of low bit-rate digital sampling...sampled of course, off of vinyl, then sounding best recorded to analog tape, and subsequently vinyl.

You'll find it in House, HipHop, Electronica, NuJazz, etc... but yeah, I definitely agree that the closer a sound is to its original analog state the more of that special something it seems to have.

Personally, I seem to gravitate to lo-fi music in general. Digital or not. Cody Chestnutt's album is a fine example. Yeah, its done in proTools or whatever, but its done in his bedroom, its crunchy and it oozes soul. I'm hungry, gonna go eat.

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Post by Sweep » Sat May 06, 2006 7:28 am

theglyph wrote:Real instruments can be sampled at high enough rates that the digitized signals graph would approach a continuous form.
theglyph wrote:I often think about Arturia's Moog emulations and wonder if I Judge the Real Minis to sound better simply because I can't accept that a CD/DVD can generate sounds as well as real analog circuits no matter how close they get to the real thing.
I think these are helpful observations - and inter-related ones. If transitions are smooth enough, and at a high enough rate, the senses relay information smoothly and not in the form of separate elements. That's true of sound, and also of vision. We see a film (movie) as a continuous flow of movement and not as a series of stills, and in fact all our vision of the world edits out the blindspot the human eye has and presents a smooth transition that moves around the disjuncture that happens where the optic nerve obscures what we see.

A lot of the attitudes people have in analogue versus digital debates seem to come from prior expectations. I do have to say I've heard some bad digital stuff, including both synthesised digital stuff and bad digital recordings. But from developing experience I've concluded that those problems aren't due to the digital medium as such.

When recording I use both digital and analogue recorders, depending on the kinds of sounds I'm working with. I've found the digital recorder doesn't record some sounds as well as analogue - and the main problems have been with a keyboard using sampled piano sounds, and some kinds of sound from the Roland V Synth. It seems to handle the Voyager or the MS20 fine.

Wendy Carlos did some blind A/B tests and concluded that people who said they preferred analogue recording either couldn't detect a difference or preferred digital when their preconceptiosn didn't get in the way.

As far as synths are concerned, I have the Roland D50 card installed in my V-synth, and I initially found the D50 very characterless. Later digital synths have a richness and colour to the sound that the D50 lacks (both the D50 card and actual D50s on records), which suggests the remedy is advancing digital technology and not an inherent problem with digital as such.

Also, I made a sudden breakthrough with programming the D50 by using the partial tuning to create orchestral textures, which convinced me against all my expectations that the D50 has something valuable to offer. As always, it's a matter of horses for courses. A certain synth might do a lot of things badly, but do one or two things supremely well. And that applies whether it's an analogue or a digital synth.

Regarding softsynths, I recorded a demo mostly using Arturia softsynths for someone who doesn't like digital recordings (and therefore may be expected not to like digital sound or anything computer processed). They were very surprised when I happened to mention how much part the computer played in recording that demo.

I have analogue-style lead sounds from the Arturia 2600V that sound richer and creamier than the Voyager in some applications. And I use the Voyager layered with Arturia sounds a lot of the time, and the two blend together beautifully. Similarly, I've recently been using EMS Rehberg's soft Synthi AKS and sampling sounds from it into the V-synth, and the results can sound like full-on analogue sonic attack. :D

I think many people haven't caught up with softsynths yet. They try to play them on computers that aren't powerful enough, and with low-end soundcards, and they think the problem is with the software. It's rather like playing a Voyager through a really small radio speaker and thinking it can't hold its own against a MiniMoog played through a Marshall. The technology for softsynths is advanced enough if you know what you're doing and you get the right system, but the point hasn't been proved by enough people yet, and there's still a lot of prejudice to conquer.

In short, my conclusion is that with the right technology being used well, and without the baggage of preconceptions and prejudices that gets in the way of direct perceiving, both digital and analogue have their values. Neither is inherently better, there are large areas between the two where it's pretty much irrelevant which is which, and neither is more `real' than the other. In some ways I'm surprised by that. I've certainly not been free of preconceptions myself, especially in the area of digital recording. It's nice to be proved wrong sometimes, especially when that opens up massive new areas for making music.

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Post by brain_11 » Sun May 07, 2006 4:13 pm

I have a feeling that you relate human to "analog" in contrast to robot which is "digital". I see no reason for this comparition, though. Can you explain why do you think so?

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Post by museslave » Sun May 07, 2006 6:29 pm

I must admit that both analog audio generation and digital audio generation have their merits.
However, there is a world of difference between digital audio recording/reproduction, and digital audio generation.
The lamest digital recording of a Minimoog may not contain all of the frequencies generated by the Minimoog, and it may not have a desireable character, BUT... it still has the TIMBRE of a Minimoog.
An emulation of the Minimoog is an attempt to create the timbre of a Minimoog out of that which is NOT a Minimoog. The origin of the sound is ENTIRELY different, and great lengths have to be gone to to arrive at something that sounds anything like it. Tricks, if you will. So much of the complexity of a software emulation goes into tricking our ears into hearing similarity... and as we know... it's easy to be tricked... but effective trickery does not equal reality.
A digital emulation of a Minimoog may or may not sound like a Minimoog, but a (reasonable) digital recording of a Minimoog always will.
My point being that there is a difference between digital recording and digital emulation. :
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Post by EricK » Sat May 13, 2006 12:44 pm

Alot of people assicoate DIGITAL with being equal to something of a high technological value. Cell phones, satellite signals, digital cameras are all pretty much considered to be the latest technological breakthroughs.

Our Motorola StarTac phone was an analog cell phone and it was so expensive to operate it was ridiculous. (Still have it too!)

I have a friend of mine from India who knows nothing of analog synbthesis or synths. He is a computer freak. He has 3 top of the line computers in his small apartment. He made the comment at work "Im going digital" and i said "Im going analog" lolol. Of corse this made me sound like i was stuck in the 80's.

THink back in computer technology when Images were "Digitized" and therefore looked like real pictures. This was back when the AMIGA was the great thing and the IMB 386 computer was the next great advancement. THose pictures we hailed as looking closest to the real pictures and the cga stuff well....looked like crap.

THink about a digital studio making the word digital equating to the word clean. Crystal clear, dolby digital surround sound etc. But if we go back to those tascam analog 8 tracks alot of people can't really accept that.

Its a hard concept for people to grasp that Digital isn't the greatest thing. But the technological bandwagon keeps rolling ahead and noone wants tape based recorders anymore.


It all comes down to what me and my friend refer to as "Purpose defeating technology"

So the world's music studios have gone to digital. But then they have to buy these fuzz generators to recreate that analog "Warmth"

THey spend thousands of dollars on this top of the line digital mixer and proclaim:
"Dude, this just sounds too clean, lets get those analog modelers"

They get a digital synth that is an analog modeling synthisizer.

Radio tubes are obsolete but they have Tube modeling amps lolololol. People woudl buy a tube amp and get a digital modeling unit to cancel out that analog sound lolol.

They have sugar babies pills and then they have pills to make you soft when you have lasted too long

Its purpose Defeating technology my friends.

CD's came out and they were hailed as being the greatest inventions, they last forever (year right) and they always say on the box "This digital compact disc was created from the original Analogue masters and may reveal the limitations of the original source material" something like that

But we all know that vinyl always sounds better. Probably because the stylus recreates the sound wave, which is what analog synths do.

But how many of you sold your vinyl collections for cd's?

People don't want to spend the time in a darkroom with chemical vats developing their own film when they can take a dvd to walmart and have their digital prints recreated over and over again.


But to totally bring my post full circle to the original topic idea, I wish that with the Voyager, I coudl control a midi robot to do my bidding while I was playing a gig.



Interesting topic.
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Post by EricK » Sun May 14, 2006 12:04 pm

Heres a question id like to add to the discusion concerning the soft synths vs the real ones.


Whats the difference in the sound wave?

THeoretically speaking, the Model D or the Voyager will try to perfectly recreate the soundwave of another instrument.

When you blow a horn it produces a certian sound wave. If you can make a clone of that soundwave, then surely it would sound exactly the same right? Its the air thats vibrated that our ears process right?


So based on this, what exactly is the difference between a soundwave generated by a soft synth, vs that of a real synth?



I know the Voyager has some patches that totally sound like real clavinets.


If the soundwave is exactly the same, wouldn't it be a comparison to a strand of DNA created in a lab vs one that was created in nature.

COuld you tell the difference by looking at it or hearing it?



Is it a matter of tricking our ears really? Isn't a sawtooth wave a sawtooth wave?


I would love to see what you guys think of this.



And finally, could they include an accurate oscilloscope on a soft synth?
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Post by Boeing 737-400 » Sun May 14, 2006 6:13 pm

It all comes down to what me and my friend refer to as "Purpose defeating technology"

So the world's music studios have gone to digital. But then they have to buy these fuzz generators to recreate that analog "Warmth"

THey spend thousands of dollars on this top of the line digital mixer and proclaim:
"Dude, this just sounds too clean, lets get those analog modelers"

They get a digital synth that is an analog modeling synthisizer.

Radio tubes are obsolete but they have Tube modeling amps lolololol. People woudl buy a tube amp and get a digital modeling unit to cancel out that analog sound lolol.

They have sugar babies pills and then they have pills to make you soft when you have lasted too long

Its purpose Defeating technology my friends.
Man, this has to be the greatest post ever! :)

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analog vs digital

Post by nigeynige » Thu May 18, 2006 12:36 pm

Well for me they both serve a purpose.
I've spent hours on my other synths(JD800, JP8000, Supernova) trying to recreate Sounds that sound like ANALOG Giants of the synth world....
Then have tried to recreate acoustic instruments on my Voyager, Multi and MiniMoogs.....I've even tried to take samples of real instruments and mess with them so that they no longer sound like a real instrument....
Where do I stop?
The answer is
"I CAN'T".
and neither will the debate....

When you achieve an acoustic instrument sound(Bassoon for example) on an analog unit, you are so happy....you wanna tell the world....
When you play that great sounding Bassoon sample from your library of 3000gb samples....It doesn't have the same impact.....

ANALOG versus digital debate will go on for ever...
Personally I'd rather use whatever sound is right for the JOB.
I have great Moog samples..I have hoards of VST emulations, but none come near the real thing.

What would you prefer......
Dream that you are flying or Actually Fly?
Because Dreaming is what people are actually doing when they think they re-create Moog sounds on other synth....My humble opinion.

Nige

Anyway, Nice subject.....
Next debate.....
"Death by Chocolate or Mississippi mud pie"?
Which one is best?
or
GADGETRY or pure and simple straight forward synth...No frills?

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Post by Don » Sun May 21, 2006 12:00 am

All sound in analog. It's the way our ears hear.

If you do a fourier analysis of a sound over time, the graphs will quickly show why the precision of digitally created sounds--which, depending upon its specific method of creation will be missing upper and lower harmonics, will have different speeds of harmonics entering and leaving, etc.--sounds different than sound created in an analog fashion.

The problem, IMO, is that digital currently does not popularly have the range of traditional analog.

Digital filters cut off sharply. Since it is a belief that we don't hear outside the 20-20k range, there is no need to have digital sound sources that create overtones that extend beyond that range. But the truth is that is only a bell-curve average, and musicians especially go way beyond the curve. Further, beside many people being able to hear beyond that range, we all have other senses that detect sounds outside that range. Some movie theaters have had special speakers installed to produce lower frequencies to shake everyone during explosions. One movie, years ago, even advertised this for theaters with that installation ("Earthquake").

The major difference, then, is not that digital is inherently bad or inferior, it is that we, as musicians and music consumers, don't demand better. There is no reason that digital and analog sound creation could have undetectable differences except that for most people, as indicated by what is purchased, "it's good enough."

For hundreds of years, printing was analog. A smoothly carved piece of wood evolved into smoothly carved pieces of wood and then to smoothly cast metal. This eventually evolved into an analog photographic process (called "phototypesetting" and later, "imagesetting"). But then came the laser printer. A wonderful replacement for cheap typewriters at 300 dpi, but not high enough quality for books. And yet, books started coming out with poorly designed pages printed at 300 dpi. Except among typesetting professionals, I did not hear or read one person complain. It was crap quality, but it was good enough for the market.

And right now, digitally-produced sound is like that 300 dpi page. Experts may rage, but it's an impotent rage. The market has spoken, and like the reviewer who talked about MS Windows once said, "We'll use it not because it's good, but because it's good enough."

Personally, I don't think it's good enough. It should be better. But whine all we want, it's like trying to hold back the tides with a bucket filled with holes. There's a concept known as "Gresham's Law" which states that "bad money drives good money out of circulation." The good money is still there, but there's far more bad money going around.

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Post by theglyph » Sun May 21, 2006 12:41 am

UhOh!

This may come down to semantics!

The meaning of analog is an analogy to a real device!

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=analog

So:

If my Voyager sounds like a flute than it's sound is analagous to a flute!

If my Waldorf Q sounds like a flute than it's sound is also analagous to a flute! Hmm, Waldorf did advertise that the Q was the "most powerful analog synth on the market!"

Oh crap! My Voyager and my Q are real devices! If my Paia 9700 sounds like my Q isn't my Paia an analog synth and my Q the real instrument to which it is analogous to?

"Look man, I can make my Paia sound like my Q!"

BTW I'm just kidding although the above issue could be put into linguistic debate!!!! Electrical and computer engineers will otherwise crap on it! :wink:

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