On Tuesday, 3 May 2022 at 14:59:12 UTC, claptrap wrote:
> Yeah genius is probably the wrong word, but what I mean is its like that quote about genius being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Focusing on saying the idea was obvious is doing a disservice to whats involved in actually getting it working.
Ok, but in DSP I think many ideas are obvious if you know the field, but getting the right mix, the right hacks, the right tweaks, getting it to run fast and making it sound good takes a lot of effort (or can happen as an accident :-). I certainly don't doubt that there are many years of highly skilled effort that has gone into the product as it is today. But that is solid engineering, not a moment of "wowsers!" :-D
> And to be far almost all human knowledge is built up in layers. Even when someone solves a really hard problem you usually find lots of different people have chipped away at it in different ways.
I think what is special in computer music is that the bottom layer is all about human perception of sound. I think knowledge at that layer is more impressive than the other layers. Like, the technology behind mp3 isn't really all that impressive, what makes it impressive is how they used knowledge about human perception (our lack of ability to distinguish differences/resolutions between certain "sound textures"). When developers manage to create new "illusions" based on perceptional psychology and create algorithms that exploit that you have something special in my eyes (regardless of whether it has any practical application).
> See to me that's less impressive, I mean I reckon people were doing FM synthesis with analog hardware already. So it was more likely just a refinement, or exploration, it's actually technically pretty simple.
It is difficult to find any individual discovery that is obviously impressive, and I guess putting a sin() into another sin() may seem intuitive, given people already used LFOs. I think the work he put into making it musically useful and expressive creating new types of bell-like sounds is why people emphasis his contribution. I find this wiki-quote a bit funny: «This was Stanford's most lucrative patent at one time, eclipsing many in electronics, computer science, and biotechnology.»
Fooling around with some math expressions paid off! It was apparently first made available in Synclavier I, which I find interesting, upper high end at the time.
> I mean real time pitch tracking and artifact free pitch shifting are orders of magnitude harder problems than FM synthesis.
Many people worked on that though? It is very much the work of a community… In general most things in audio build on something else. Like, the concept of vocoders is in some way ingenious, but it was invented for speech in telecom by Bell labs in 1930s.
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