I'm a musician.

I play the guitar, but I'm not a trained musician.

Veiling.

It's no word near an expert, but being a programmer and being interested in music, I thought, It's about time we have a go at trying to build a synthesizer.

This will be a software synthesizer, and I know you can get them, but I think it will be an interesting learning exercise.

I believe this will be a multi part video today.

We're only really going to look at the basics of what is a sound wave on How do we represent that on the computer system?

Andi.

Going to share with you some code that I've written, which will allow you to play with these sound waves very easily.

Single single file of code you can pull into any project you like.

Those intro themes that you heard me play there were back to the future on dhe Godfather on they were replicated using my PC keyboard is it is an input on a square wave for an output.

No, that might not mean anything to you right now, but By the end of this video, you'll have a good understanding.

I should say now that this video is is really aimed at the beginner, perhaps both in sound synthesis and for programming, although I will throw in some programming tricks to make sure we got the more advanced programmers to keep them on their toes.

Let's start with the very basics.

Here is a sine wave.

You can think of a sine wave as being air moving backwards and forwards to generate sound.

In fact, if you look at your loudspeaker, you know the code, you see it bouncing backwards and forwards imagine that here is when the sweet speakers switched off, the cone pushing out, going backwards, going forwards going backwards, going forwards going backwards.

The more it goes in and out, the louder the sound will be.

And that's called amplitude, so amplitude you can also think of in terms of volume.

Loudness professionals will measure amplitude in decibels.

We're not going to touch that just yet.

We're gonna keep it very simple.

Now, the basic formula for a sine wave is amplitude time.

Sign off the frequency Times time, the same way I got on the screen here is not centered around zero.

It's actually offset 0.5 because I'm going to use This is a visualization tool and it will make things a little bit clearer.

Result to understand on frequency is how many times we see a peak within a given time interval.

So if I increase the we could see here we could see we get more peaks.

Let's take this time period here 0 to 5.

As I increase the frequency we Seymour peaks and as I decrease it, we see fewer and I can change the amplitude.

So remember amplitude was loudness.

We're going from 0 to 1.

I would just like to take this moment to point out how excellent this Tulis this is Desmond, stop calm, which is a free graphing and mathematical tool for educational purposes.

Now we'll understand frequency as being pitch, so high frequencies are high notes and lower frequencies are low notes.

And that's why I really Basie sounds, you hear throaty.

You see the speaker moving very slowly, but sometimes you can see it, but in high frequencies, he can't see it moving it all.

So we know these low frequencies are based on high frequencies are trouble.

All sound is made up of sine waves of different frequencies and amplitude.

And if we take sine waves of different frequencies and amplitude and abdomen together, we can create interesting textures on different sounding instruments.

So here's a little example of adding sine waves together.

Now the formula looks horrible And I'm afraid if you don't like maths, then probably synthesis isn't for you.

But the mass isn't too bad.

Uh, here we've got three sine wave equations with a fixed amplitude.

In this case, 0.50 point 250.1.

But we get to vary the frequency of each one of them.

Now, by adjusting the sliders we can take a frequency on, we'll add another one to it.

So if we had a very low frequency here, there we go to a high frequency and sea mounts a little bit.

That will have an interesting sound, and we can add a lower fundamental frequency to it, which is more dominant.

This has the larger amplitude.

And just by manipulating sine waves in this way, we can create all sounds.

This project is really about coding a synthesizer.

I will be sticking to the Microsoft Windows platform.

That's because I've already written some code, which interfaces with the sound hard work and that's available to download below or fromthe one loan coded dot com website to keep it simple.

I'm going to create a Win 30 to console application, and we'll call it sounds synthesizer.

I wanted to be an empty project that generates lots of stuff I'm not going to use, and we'll keep it as a consul project.

So we're not going to bother with Windows.

Gu Ys o r controls Everything will be handled just a the command prompt, and this is a nice way and to make it easy for people to learn, I like consul programs because they're limited in their access and their abilities to display information.

This focuses you to think really about what you're doing, creating an empty project that will create a source file c++, and I'm going to call that one made all of the code I'm going to include for download and in this video is written to be accessible.

It's not written to be the most optimal or intelligent way to solve the problem.

I'm learning about how to do synthesis is and producing this video, and I'm hoping that through learning myself, all the people might try and avoid some problems.

Die encounter.

So let's begin at the very beginning.

We want some basic console activity.

Now.

I will be using Standard Library quite a bit, so I'm going to throw that in there just to keep my coat simple.

We wanted an in Maine program starts on return to Syria.

Now I mentioned before, we're going to be cheating a little bit.

I've already written a file which will access the sound hard work for us, and you just have to take my word for it.

That this file There's nothing off the present data to the sound card.

The source code is available.

Please have a look at what we're using.

This is a starting point, I think, in a future video.

Explain how this fire works.

But right now I think let's get stuck into actually generating some noise.

I've already created a file which will talk to the hard work for us.

Let's add that to the project.

But at the existing, I said it's called one lone code a noisemaker don't age.

Well, have a look at that very briefly.

But really, all it is doing is accessing the sound hard work, creating a threat in the background on presenting those with a hook to apply data to the sound card.

I will explain all of that in detail in a future video, right?

I've created a short program here, which lists all of the sound hard work available on the computer on DDE Crazy instance.

Off a class called I will See Noisemaker Cold Sound.

It's using the first device that it finds, which is usually assistance default sound device.

I'm also going to now include some additional numbers and we'll have a look at what these mean.

So I want the sample rate to be 44,100.

I want the number of channels to be one on.

I'm going to put into magic mystery numbers for now into the end.

Here.

You see that actually, our default numbers provided by this class so feel free to use it without making these modifications.

So why is noisemaker using a short here in angle brackets?

And what is the sample rate?

And what does it mean?

Well, let's have a look back at does Most powered Graf, take the original way.

Form off the on.

Bring back our existing way, for we need to represent this way form a smoothly as possible on a computer.

Can't do that.

A computer will only be able to store numbers digitally to a fixed amount of precision.

We can emulate this by applying, uh, the second function here.

Now I will go into what this function is doing just yet, but it's a nice way of visualizing what happens as we as we apply more bits to represent the numbers that represent the sine wave.

So a CZ we increase the number of bits we can see that the approximation to the sine wave becomes more and more accurate.

So with this sign wave one bits, you really only get a choice of top bottom, top bottom, top bottom because you've got one bit.

It can be on off on off if we have to.

Bits, we can see there are four states in between.

We got bottom, but about 1/3 of the way up 2/3 of the way up on the top and so on.

And as we increase the number of bits, we increase the accuracy of the representation.

So let's take eight bits commonly known.

It's one bite and so you mean so Now we've got 256 levels to represent a sine wave.

We can see we consume in quite a bit, but it's still an approximation now.

A short is 16 bits.

See, we need a lot more zooming to get thin, still an approximation.

But accuracy is now quite high.

The number of bits in this case, a 16 bit short is really used to store the accuracy of the amplitude.

The sample rates the 44,100 is really used to store the accuracy of frequency.

Now, according to Nyquist, we need a sample rate, which is double the highest frequency we want to record in our sound synthesis.

Now, human range human hearing range, that is, is about 20 hertz to 20,000 hurts, so 44,100 is a little bit more than double 20,000 hertz, which means we should be able to, in the most extreme cases, capture with some accuracy a 20,000 hertz or 20 kilohertz signal.

Now the nice thing about this piece of code is we can, of course, change our shorts to a char and it becomes an eight bit system.

Or we could change it to on INT, which becomes a 32 bit system.

For for audiophiles, only 16 bit at 44,100 is a common settle for most sound surfaces.

The number of channels here is.

Do we have a stereo system or nothing?

In this case, no, we don't.

We'll worry about that later on different video.

Right now, it's just going to assume we've got one speaker attached to the system, the eight in the 512 here used as part of latent see management on Dhe.

When we explore how the noisemaker utility works, this will become very apparent, but ultimately that we're trying to reduce the delay between hitting a key on the keyboard on hearing sound.

But if we don't give the sound hard work enough memory, which is effectively what these two numbers are defining, it gets starved of noise to make.

So it's a it's a balancing act.

We'll find ways to tune that in the future, So let's carry on writing our program.

Now we've created the hard work on.

We've set it up.

We want to create a function which allows us to play with the shape of the way for I.

Where do we put the mathematics?

So let's create a little function appear on.

We'll call it make noise, and it's important that the function takes a double type argument of de time.

The noisemaker class does everything using doubles simply because they're easy for people to understand, and they look simple on the screen.

In reality, sound hard work on the software machine does everything using interviews.

We'll worry about that some of the time, but like I said at the start of this video, let's keep this simple.

So we're going to make the noise Double D time now Double D time is tthe e time that has passed since the start of the program on We'll put in a sine wave.

So let's remember now it's sign.

Well, let's pick a frequency now.

I'm not just picking a frequency here at random.

I'm picking 440 hertz, which is on a four on a keyboard.

You can Wikipedia.

Why, that's the case.

But for now, we'll say 440 hurts on effectively.

We times that by de time.

So here we've got a frequency of 440 hurts amplitude of no 4400.5 and it's a sine wave.

There is one more thing we need to do that and that is a little numerical trick because this is a frequency of Hertz on Sign.

Doesn't really take hurt.

It takes angular velocity.

So we just need to do a conversion.

But that's simply enough.

That just becomes two times pi on.

We return all of that semi colon.

Then we returned all of that ass that give the given point of time that is supplied to us.

What should our sine wave look like now?

We need to link that function with the noise making class.

So this is simply a case off.