
Generate your own sounds with NSynth - pkmital
https://magenta.tensorflow.org/nsynth-fastgen
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asher
This story reminded me to clean up a very different synth and put it on
github:

[https://github.com/wildsparx/synthem80](https://github.com/wildsparx/synthem80)

Unlike NSynth, synthem80 is directed to a specific and humble goal - make
early 80s-style arcade sounds. It uses a mini-language to control an engine
similar to that in Pacman.

For instance, the sound when Pacman eats a ghost:

    
    
        ./synthem80 -o eat-monster.sw 'timer(t=0.5) wav(wf=1 f=2 a=45) add(a=< b=48) nmc(wf=5 f=<)'

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svantana
I'm sorry but is the Deep Learning Hype strong enough to warp people's sensory
perception? Every sample on this page sounds terrible IMHO, and pretty much
what you would get if you would spend 10 minutes implementing the most naive
spectrogram resynthesis you could think of. Granted, there is great promise in
finding the "manifold of music", which seems to be the goal here, but what
they show is just not anywhere near that promise.

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shams93
They're using very low quality sample rates, 8 bit, not pretty. Until it can
do 32 hit samples it's going to sound horrible.

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SwellJoe
I've read the articles about NSynth with interest, but I can't figure out
_why_ they're using 8-bit and low sample rates. Surely, it's not _that_ much
more computationally intensive that they can't tinker at 8 bits and then do a
render at a high resolution once they've settled on some parameters they like.

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doomlaser
Possibly the same reason all the Style Transfer implementations use very low
resolution images? All the neural net applications I've seen seem to have
problems with high resolutions in any form.

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the_cat_kittles
i feel stupid and do not get what this is all about. so there is something
that synthesizes sounds by feeding it audio files? i dont get what is
happening here. i tried semi hard to understand, but i figure someone can give
the big picture that i think im missing.

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sowbug
Could this approach be used for media compression? I've wondered how
compressible a popular-music track could be if you had a sufficiently rich
language to describe it. This seems like a method to answer that question.

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kuschku
This would be basically MIDI, right?

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noonespecial
Or sheet music. It always amazed me that humans came up with any solution at
all to "here's a piece of paper, tell me what your song sounds like" to say
nothing of one that actually works to some degree.

I've always wondered how much classical music sounds the way it does because
sheet music is the way it is.

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the_cat_kittles
my guess is that the sheet music has an enormous effect. because it can encode
somethings very well, and other things poorly.

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oddlyaromatic
An example of this is Chinese guqin tablature. It can be centuries old and
includes a lot of detail on where to place fingers and how to strike the
strings, which can give you hints about pitch and timbre when combined with
knowing the tuning, strings, etc. But the tablature has almost nothing to say
about the LENGTH of each note, so rhythm has to be inferred by the performer
from what they know about the culture.

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sebringj
I'm just starting to learn tensorflow from a developer non-data-scientist
view. This is great. From a laymen view, it seems it needs a training session
for eliminating noise or static.

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ryan-allen
I think the N sounds for 'not a' synth. I have a heap of synths and they make
much nicer sounds!

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6stringmerc
Eh seen this submitted before, totally agree with the early criticism here
because it's the same as the last time.

Woo hoo you built a noise maker! Kazoos for everybody!

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seandougall
But it also does convolution! I totally wasn't doing that in Max/MSP in 2003.

Snark aside, there's a lot of really awesome creative potential stemming from
WaveNet. This just seems like the least novel application I've seen.

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funkychicken
Apple missed a golden objective-c opportunity here.

