Audio Synthesis in Music

This chapter presents some methods of audio synthesis for creating music. It provides examples of such time-morphing of music. The chapter describes granular synthesis of music and a beautiful example of musical synthesis, known as phase vocoding. By introducing a gentle onset and gentle end to the signal, via multiplication by the window function, the sound quality of the signal is rendered more tonal, more musical. The combination of human vocals with piano chords creates a timbre that sounds a bit like organ music. Auto-Tune is often used in popular music to create unusual timbre in the processed vocals. The chapter discusses a widely used type of granular synthesis, known as phase vocoding. The Musescore program can read Musical Instrument Device Interface (MIDI) files and produce a score from them, and it can also save a score in MIDI format. The chapter concludes by describing MIDI synthesis.