Applications of Synchronization in Sound Synthesis

Proceedings of the 8th Sound and Music Computing Conference SMC, 6. - 9. July 2011, Padova, Italy

The synchronization of natural and technical periodic processes can be simulated with self-sustained oscillators. Under certain conditions, these oscillators adjust their frequency and their phase to a master oscillator or to other self-sustained oscillators. These processes can be used in sound synthesis for the tuning of non-linear oscillators, for the adjustment of the pitches of other oscillators, for the synchronization of periodic changes of any sound parameters and for the synchronization of rhythms. This paper gives a short introduction to the theory of synchronization [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], shows how to implement the differential equations which describe the self-sustained oscillators and gives some examples of musical applications. The examples are programmed as mxj~ externals for MaxMSP. The Java code samples are taken from the perform routine of these externals. The externals and Max patches can be downloaded from http://www.icst.net/downloads.