Abstract:

It's described a new approach for the SOM-A sound generating system which has new features, including an editing tool for assisted musical composition, a graphical interface for visualizing orthogonal timbres, an instrument analyser capable of displaying the envelope of every spectral component, a normalizer device for scaling automatically the amplitude to fit exactly a predefined range, and some realtime sound rendering facilities. Once SOM-A is now implemented as a public set of Java classes, populations of additive synthesis objects can be defined inside hyper documents, virtual reality worlds, as well as in general purpose Internet programs whether applets or local applications. In order to provide an effective means for instant audition to the user, the Java Sound API has been added to the SOM-A signal synthesis domain as its sound rendering unit.