Creating Melodies with Analyze Spectrum

In this unnarrated movie, Todd Barton demonstrates how one can use recorded sound as the basis for an Image Synth preset that preserves the articulation of the original sound. Todd resynthesizes a phrase of recorder music with a violin instrument.

Source: Recorder Phrase recorded in Montage Room

Result 1: The melody synthesized with a violin multisampler

Result 2: The resynthesis mixed with the source sound.

Todd says:

The tutorial takes a live performance of a soprano recorder (played directly into an old Pismo Mac powerbook) and changes it into a folk fiddle. The beauty of MS is that by doing a spectrum analysis you can get all the
ornaments, slides, pitchbends, articulations and nuances of the recorder performance into the fiddle performance. The tutorial takes you through this process. Result 2 combines the fiddle in two octaves along with
the original recorder in the Montage Room.

The orchestration possibilities are enormous!

Preparation:
Before the tutorial starts, Todd has recorded a phrase of soprano recorder in the Montage Room, cropped it to remove leading and trailing silence, and loaded the sound into the sample editor (shortcut: f). If you do not have MetaSynth Pro, you can record using any application that records audio.

Source Tip: Recorder, penny whistle, flute and whistling (if you can whistle with stable pitch) are the best sources for this technique because they create very few of the overtones that need to be removed before re-synthesis. Falsetto singing can also be an effective source.

The violin multisampler is available for download by all registered MetaSynth users. It is also found on the MS 2.x CD-ROM.

Watch the demonstration by clicking here (please be patient as it loads)