Additive Synthesis Of Sound By Taking Advantage Of Psychoacoustics

Lagrange M.; Marchand S.
DAFx-2001 - Limerick
In this paper we present an original technique designed in order to speed up additive synthesis. This technique consists in taking into account psychoacoustic phenomena (thresholds of hearing and masking) in order to ignore the inaudible partials during the synthesis process, thus saving a lot of computation time. Our algorithm relies on a specific data structure called “skip list” and has proven to be very efficient in practice. As a consequence, we are now able to synthesize an impressive number of spectral sounds in real time, without overloading the processor.
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