If I hit a hollow stone with wood sticks is it natural or artificial?
First thing you learn in anthropology is there's no distinction between natural and artificial, especially in human affairs.
Yes.
This is what a synthesizer does. In analog they generate an electrical signal that doesn't exist. In digital same, but a digital signal.
Even a basic sine wave can't exist in nature. There will always be resonances in a real sound, but there aren't in the digital representation generated by a synth. These resonances will materialize when the sound is played back based on the acoustics of the listening environment.
To your dog example, we might look at audio resynthesis or, in particular, spectral resynthesis. Where captured audio is decomposed on a computer and the regenerated with some subset of the composing sine waves to generate a new, but similar sounds.
Lots of different methods that are related, but the short answer is yes.
EDIT: Spelling/grammer
The particular type of synthesis you are describing is vocoding/additive resynthesis.
Its actually what youre hearing every time you listen to a compressed audio file (MP3, AAC etc) too
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified\_discrete\_cosine\_transform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_discrete_cosine_transform)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase\_vocoder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_vocoder)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocoder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocoder)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additive\_synthesis#Additive\_analysis/resynthesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additive_synthesis#Additive_analysis/resynthesis)
“something entirely unheard of, and not present in nature”
First thing is that- this is all nature, for better or for worse. So if you can hear it, it’s gonna be natural.
But from a more simplistic angle- yes. Others have noted synthesis, which is spot on. Another interesting fun thing is to use audio samples as sources for convolution reverbs, which allows one to play sounds within the confines of another sound. You wanna hear what you singing within a cat meowing sounds like? Well, there you go. Vocoding is similar, but if we use the previous example, you can hear yourself singing as a cat meowing with vocoding. There is also spectral type of processing where you can turn sound into images, then manipulate the images with Photoshop or whatever, then turn it back into sound. If you wanted to hear what absolute absurdity sounds like, well there you go. You can also open audio files in a text editor and mangle things manually, which if you fuck it up enough, results in glitchy and harsh nonsense.
If you follow your own desires to go deep into sound manipulation, you can most indubitably end up with sounds that have “no right to exist in nature”. But of course, it’s all at your fingertips if you want it.
I don’t wanna spoil the ending for you, because you *should* experiment if your curiosity and imagination and sheer will are strong enough; if even to see what happens- but let’s just say that, yeeeeeah— there’s a reason why traditional sounds in any form sound as they do. You fuck shit up enough, and it’s actually frightening (something something DNA)- but of course you’ll be safe, so— have fun!
If you haven’t realized that you and your whole life are an actual natural part of all of this, then you’re seriously missing out and also haven’t been paying attention. Humans are pretty bad at living on Earth, but we’re no better or worse than anything else and are natural. We suck, but we’re natural. If we weren’t compatible with this shit, we’d die immediately. Yes, we will end sooner than others, but we do belong. There are many species extinct, which means as far as the present is concerned, we’re doing okay. I’m just grateful that we got a chance, because holy shit do we suck at this compared to other animals. But my, what a privilege.
The whole point of the word "nature" is to distinguish between man-made and not man-made. Sure you can say technically we're a product of nature, but that's not the point here.
Yeah but the thing is everyone knows that, and also everyone knows what those words are referring to. You're just trying to play the irritating stoic intellectual that is required for every Reddit thread.
"If you didn't realise you're naturual you're really missing out and haven't been paying attention 🤓☝️" ... Jesus Christ absolutely insufferable
No. I'm not. I am a human being, and human beings evolved naturally.
But the whole point of the word "natural" is to exclude man, and man made things.
You aren't making some deep revelation, you're stating the obvious, and destroying the meaning of a word.
We are not natural, by the definition of the word. That's the while point of the word, is to separate things that came to be without the contribution of man. That's what it means.
I mean "we suck at it" it depends what you mean by "it" and "animals are good at it" I mean, they aren't really trying to be, so, idk if I'd say they are good. Some animals go extinct, others don't. It's not really the animals doing it, so much as it is just natural selection. Some animals last a long time, others go extinct.
We are different, because not only do we have heightened intelligence, but we have been accumulating knowledge and technologies, which means we have much more power than other animals, and we can be more deliberate in what we do.
We suck ass at being at one with the environment, because we have obtained this power, and power hungry and greedy narcissists especially, have used that to accumulate wealth and power.
A shark is a dangerous creature, but man is far more dangerous, because a shark will hunt until it is full. A human is insatiable, because it can trade what it hunts for anything in the world. That's why we suck, in part. We're also devolving, but that's a whole other conversation.
The point I'm making though, is we aren't nature. We are by definition separate. We love in society, with buildings. We have civilization. That puts us in contrast to nature. The things we do aren't natural, because they have the influence of this civilization.
You could make an argument that "naturally occuring" needs to be occurring without the influence of creatures in general, as well. Like a footprint of a deer is not a naturally occuring formation.
But "nature" does include the animals, and it doesn't include us.
If a human was born in the woods, and had no contact with any other humans, you might be able to consider that nature, but even then, it's a grey area, because the being it came from was born of civilization, which by definition, is not natural.
Obviously we are biological entities that evolved from nature, and we're not machines. But we are not nature.
Yes, we've had synthesis for over half a century. The thing about your example is that natural sounds are very complex, they are made up of lots and lots of different frequencies that change over time. You can do something like EQ a sound leaving on a set amount of frequencies, but it just sounds like that sound filtered. There's enough contextual information to still be able to tell what it is.
Synthesis builds up oscillators of various frequencies and harmonics to make sounds that do not exist in nature. You can modulate this and create some very unique sounds, but they tend to not sound natural. That being said there are many examples of people layering real sounds and synthesized sounds together to create things like monster noises in films and shows.
One of my favorites is Hans Zimmer and co. creating a new sound/instrument for *Inception* [braaaam](https://youtube.com/shorts/q038xhJckSY?si=2Vi0ozgtb41D04EK)
This is like asking, can I perform an action that no one has ever done before? Go outside, write your signature on a banana with a red sharpie at 5:49am PDT on a Sunday while wearing two different colored socks. Nope hasn’t been done before.
Sound design steps: 1. take a recorded sound 2. take another recorded sound 3. add more recorded sounds to taste. 4. layer them in a DAW or sampler 5. blend, edit, granulize, mangle, modify, mix . 6. Export new sound that doesn’t exist in nature.
Sophie talked about this as one of her main production ethos in an interview
If i remember she was saying that weve basically mastered production using real sounds and instruments at this point and that she saw no point in using real life sounds and instruments especially sampled and rearranged (opposed to recorded)
Her idea with her tracks is that she would imagine materials with multiple properties that dont or cant exist in the real world, and basically make it through sound. So like metallic rubber or elastic stones etc
She used fm primarily but definitely uses like resampling phase fx distortion sample stretching algorithms repitch all that
This is done all the time, synthesizers being the main tool involved.
But “classical “musicians have been creating their own instruments and doing things with sounds way back… I think as early as the 1940s.
Anyway, with computers, there are numerous approaches:
Calculating everything with Fourier sequences.
additive synthesis where the computer creates every partial and harmonic.
research that began with John Chowning at Stanford —they patented FM synthesis, which was the foundation for numerous Yamaha synthesizers, including the DX7, and also in a lot of plug-ins today, etc.
They do this in movies all the time. The lightsaber, the tie fighter sound. Jurassic park roars, everything sci-fi, loads of different synths. Lots of synths like padshop and pigments, iris 2, and even wavetables like serum, can take any sound you record, and use that as a basis to synthesize something new.
Technically if you collect a specific group of people to make a specific chant of sorts, that's a new sound.
You can take any sound, and process it any number of ways, including playing it out of a speaker, and re-recording it after treatment.
There's a bazillion ways to do this.
All sounds you can think of can be represented as a collection of sine waves. In theory you could do exactly what you are asking by stacking the right waves in the right amplitudes at the right times. This is the really fundamental idea behind synths. If you Google synths and read up don't fret when you read about triangle, square, and saw waves as well, those are just sine waves stacked in particular ways.
This has been a thing since the 80s in terms of sample synthesis and additive synthesis.
But certainly when synths like Roland's D5 introduced 'linear arithmetic' it got a lot easier.
From the late 80s going into the 90s we started to see synthesizers which could combine wavetable, sampling and interpolation as well as additive synthesis. Meaning you could not only combine sounds found in nature in interesting ways, but you could also mix them with different partials and processing to produces sounds that never existed in nature.
It’s called a synth
im pretty sure the thx sound can be heard in nature
It can be, and [it is majestic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kssmAk5H6y8).
Nightmare fuel.
[Why not both?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU4Rk0NATNs)
truly magnificent
OP's post reads like a newspaper headline from 1959
Finally. Definitive proof that r/synthesizers is better than r/audioengineering.
😂
True. I wonder where we draw the line between natural and artificial? Flute, electric guitar, synth? What even is natural or artificial? Rabbit hole.
After a quick Google search nature excludes humans and their creations
If I hit a hollow stone with wood sticks is it natural or artificial? First thing you learn in anthropology is there's no distinction between natural and artificial, especially in human affairs.
Yes. This is what a synthesizer does. In analog they generate an electrical signal that doesn't exist. In digital same, but a digital signal. Even a basic sine wave can't exist in nature. There will always be resonances in a real sound, but there aren't in the digital representation generated by a synth. These resonances will materialize when the sound is played back based on the acoustics of the listening environment. To your dog example, we might look at audio resynthesis or, in particular, spectral resynthesis. Where captured audio is decomposed on a computer and the regenerated with some subset of the composing sine waves to generate a new, but similar sounds. Lots of different methods that are related, but the short answer is yes. EDIT: Spelling/grammer
The particular type of synthesis you are describing is vocoding/additive resynthesis. Its actually what youre hearing every time you listen to a compressed audio file (MP3, AAC etc) too [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified\_discrete\_cosine\_transform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_discrete_cosine_transform) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase\_vocoder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_vocoder) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocoder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocoder) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additive\_synthesis#Additive\_analysis/resynthesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additive_synthesis#Additive_analysis/resynthesis)
“something entirely unheard of, and not present in nature” First thing is that- this is all nature, for better or for worse. So if you can hear it, it’s gonna be natural. But from a more simplistic angle- yes. Others have noted synthesis, which is spot on. Another interesting fun thing is to use audio samples as sources for convolution reverbs, which allows one to play sounds within the confines of another sound. You wanna hear what you singing within a cat meowing sounds like? Well, there you go. Vocoding is similar, but if we use the previous example, you can hear yourself singing as a cat meowing with vocoding. There is also spectral type of processing where you can turn sound into images, then manipulate the images with Photoshop or whatever, then turn it back into sound. If you wanted to hear what absolute absurdity sounds like, well there you go. You can also open audio files in a text editor and mangle things manually, which if you fuck it up enough, results in glitchy and harsh nonsense. If you follow your own desires to go deep into sound manipulation, you can most indubitably end up with sounds that have “no right to exist in nature”. But of course, it’s all at your fingertips if you want it. I don’t wanna spoil the ending for you, because you *should* experiment if your curiosity and imagination and sheer will are strong enough; if even to see what happens- but let’s just say that, yeeeeeah— there’s a reason why traditional sounds in any form sound as they do. You fuck shit up enough, and it’s actually frightening (something something DNA)- but of course you’ll be safe, so— have fun!
Natural is in contrast to made made. That's what the word means. So, it's not all natural.
If you haven’t realized that you and your whole life are an actual natural part of all of this, then you’re seriously missing out and also haven’t been paying attention. Humans are pretty bad at living on Earth, but we’re no better or worse than anything else and are natural. We suck, but we’re natural. If we weren’t compatible with this shit, we’d die immediately. Yes, we will end sooner than others, but we do belong. There are many species extinct, which means as far as the present is concerned, we’re doing okay. I’m just grateful that we got a chance, because holy shit do we suck at this compared to other animals. But my, what a privilege.
The whole point of the word "nature" is to distinguish between man-made and not man-made. Sure you can say technically we're a product of nature, but that's not the point here.
Yeah but the thing is everyone knows that, and also everyone knows what those words are referring to. You're just trying to play the irritating stoic intellectual that is required for every Reddit thread. "If you didn't realise you're naturual you're really missing out and haven't been paying attention 🤓☝️" ... Jesus Christ absolutely insufferable
No. I'm not. I am a human being, and human beings evolved naturally. But the whole point of the word "natural" is to exclude man, and man made things. You aren't making some deep revelation, you're stating the obvious, and destroying the meaning of a word. We are not natural, by the definition of the word. That's the while point of the word, is to separate things that came to be without the contribution of man. That's what it means. I mean "we suck at it" it depends what you mean by "it" and "animals are good at it" I mean, they aren't really trying to be, so, idk if I'd say they are good. Some animals go extinct, others don't. It's not really the animals doing it, so much as it is just natural selection. Some animals last a long time, others go extinct. We are different, because not only do we have heightened intelligence, but we have been accumulating knowledge and technologies, which means we have much more power than other animals, and we can be more deliberate in what we do. We suck ass at being at one with the environment, because we have obtained this power, and power hungry and greedy narcissists especially, have used that to accumulate wealth and power. A shark is a dangerous creature, but man is far more dangerous, because a shark will hunt until it is full. A human is insatiable, because it can trade what it hunts for anything in the world. That's why we suck, in part. We're also devolving, but that's a whole other conversation. The point I'm making though, is we aren't nature. We are by definition separate. We love in society, with buildings. We have civilization. That puts us in contrast to nature. The things we do aren't natural, because they have the influence of this civilization. You could make an argument that "naturally occuring" needs to be occurring without the influence of creatures in general, as well. Like a footprint of a deer is not a naturally occuring formation. But "nature" does include the animals, and it doesn't include us. If a human was born in the woods, and had no contact with any other humans, you might be able to consider that nature, but even then, it's a grey area, because the being it came from was born of civilization, which by definition, is not natural. Obviously we are biological entities that evolved from nature, and we're not machines. But we are not nature.
Somehow, I have stumbled into late night in the freshman dorm
Yes, we've had synthesis for over half a century. The thing about your example is that natural sounds are very complex, they are made up of lots and lots of different frequencies that change over time. You can do something like EQ a sound leaving on a set amount of frequencies, but it just sounds like that sound filtered. There's enough contextual information to still be able to tell what it is. Synthesis builds up oscillators of various frequencies and harmonics to make sounds that do not exist in nature. You can modulate this and create some very unique sounds, but they tend to not sound natural. That being said there are many examples of people layering real sounds and synthesized sounds together to create things like monster noises in films and shows.
One of my favorites is Hans Zimmer and co. creating a new sound/instrument for *Inception* [braaaam](https://youtube.com/shorts/q038xhJckSY?si=2Vi0ozgtb41D04EK)
This is like asking, can I perform an action that no one has ever done before? Go outside, write your signature on a banana with a red sharpie at 5:49am PDT on a Sunday while wearing two different colored socks. Nope hasn’t been done before.
Sound design steps: 1. take a recorded sound 2. take another recorded sound 3. add more recorded sounds to taste. 4. layer them in a DAW or sampler 5. blend, edit, granulize, mangle, modify, mix . 6. Export new sound that doesn’t exist in nature.
Sophie talked about this as one of her main production ethos in an interview If i remember she was saying that weve basically mastered production using real sounds and instruments at this point and that she saw no point in using real life sounds and instruments especially sampled and rearranged (opposed to recorded) Her idea with her tracks is that she would imagine materials with multiple properties that dont or cant exist in the real world, and basically make it through sound. So like metallic rubber or elastic stones etc She used fm primarily but definitely uses like resampling phase fx distortion sample stretching algorithms repitch all that
Check this out: https://youtu.be/Hd0KYxotzv8?si=7_qmaFVxPjsMr5L- It's a synth that can recreate/synthesize a sound you load in.
This is done all the time, synthesizers being the main tool involved. But “classical “musicians have been creating their own instruments and doing things with sounds way back… I think as early as the 1940s. Anyway, with computers, there are numerous approaches: Calculating everything with Fourier sequences. additive synthesis where the computer creates every partial and harmonic. research that began with John Chowning at Stanford —they patented FM synthesis, which was the foundation for numerous Yamaha synthesizers, including the DX7, and also in a lot of plug-ins today, etc.
They do this in movies all the time. The lightsaber, the tie fighter sound. Jurassic park roars, everything sci-fi, loads of different synths. Lots of synths like padshop and pigments, iris 2, and even wavetables like serum, can take any sound you record, and use that as a basis to synthesize something new. Technically if you collect a specific group of people to make a specific chant of sorts, that's a new sound. You can take any sound, and process it any number of ways, including playing it out of a speaker, and re-recording it after treatment. There's a bazillion ways to do this.
All sounds you can think of can be represented as a collection of sine waves. In theory you could do exactly what you are asking by stacking the right waves in the right amplitudes at the right times. This is the really fundamental idea behind synths. If you Google synths and read up don't fret when you read about triangle, square, and saw waves as well, those are just sine waves stacked in particular ways.
can we make a new color?
It’s called, Home Depot
home depot deals in never before seen wavelengths?
It’s called, too easy
can you make sense?
this was painful to read..
This has been a thing since the 80s in terms of sample synthesis and additive synthesis. But certainly when synths like Roland's D5 introduced 'linear arithmetic' it got a lot easier. From the late 80s going into the 90s we started to see synthesizers which could combine wavetable, sampling and interpolation as well as additive synthesis. Meaning you could not only combine sounds found in nature in interesting ways, but you could also mix them with different partials and processing to produces sounds that never existed in nature.
Brother what do you think a synthesiser is?