21.07.2011 SpectMorph: new release, new sounds

SpectMorph is a project that analyzes instrument sounds so that they can be combined to create new sounds (morphing). It took me a while to get the morphing part implemented so that it sounds reasonable, but here is the result of more than half a year of development time: SpectMorph 0.2.0.

Now, how does it sound to play some chords with an instrument that slowly changes between a trumpet and a male singer?

Trumpet/Ah Example

The release, instruments, and many other examples (ogg/mp3/flac) are available under www.spectmorph.org

2 comments ↓

#1 Stefan Sauer on 07.22.11 at 11:00

When I wrote a spectral morpher on SoundFX/Amiga I had fun with morphing drumloops. Wonder how it would sound in spectmorph.

#2 stw on 07.22.11 at 14:32

Well, SpectMorph was not designed with drum loops in mind. Most of the hard work was getting the “tone” component of the instrument right, and getting the “tone” morphing right.

A drum loop, when encoded with smenc will mostly be encoded as noise-parts of each frame. I’ve just tried it, and a drum loop is still very recognizable when played with smplay. It might in this case also be useful to pass –no-sines to the encoder, because there is probably no “tone” component to track.

However, the drum loop sounds a bit blurred, sharp attacks are lost; I think the sound quality is not good enough for real world music. Of course the advantage of SpectMorph encoding is that you can speed up and slow down the drum beat without making it sound worse than the normal speed playback.

As for morphing: you’d need to try it out. Since drum loops are not the primary concern, some things will be a little difficult, like getting two drum loops to loop at the same speed and alignment. But once this is done, morphing should sound ok (under the restrictions discussed above).

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