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FS1R Formant Shaping, Part 2: Human formants and terms

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  What is a formant anyway? To truly understand the FS1R, you need some background information, and you need to understand some of the terminology. Let's follow the journey that air makes when you speak. When you speak, you blow air out of your lungs.  When you close your  vocal cords  a bit, the air makes causes vibrations.  The more you open the folds: the more distance they need to cross to open/close the longer it takes to flap back and forth the lower the frequency that the chords will flap the lower the tone it produces for humans, this flapping happens about 100 to 300 times per second (100-300Hz) Yamaha calls this the  Fundamental Frequency This rhythmic oscillation produces a somewhat boring "buzzing" kind of sound. The buzz consists of short bursts of sound that are rich with overtones. Each burst fades out when the vocal folds close On the way out, the air passes your throat, tongue, checks, lips, nose and teeth.  By moving those strategical...

FS1R Formant Shaping, Part 1: Human speech

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Introduction I'll help you get a deeper understanding of Formant Shaping on the FS1R, split over multiple posts.  I'll start with some background, and then dive deeper into the technical aspects. Communication via audio Animals Many animals can make sounds: " bark ", " oink ", " tweet ", and " ssssss ".  It usually just means: " I'm here! " Some can alter their calls. A dog can bark softly or loudly, to express the difference between: " I don't really appreciate this " and " I'll tear you up! ".  Some animals can pack even more information. Birds produce a whistle-like sound that can be varied in both pitch and loudness quickly. Human speech We can do what birds to, to a certain extent: blow air from our longs and vary the pitch.   Birds outsing us on the technique of producing a single frequency that varies over time.  But we've developed something truly awesome on top of that technique. We g...

FS1R Voices and DX7

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As an FS1R user, you probably know this already: There are 1408 voices in ROM. They're split over 11 banks (A - K) , with 128 voices each. ROM From the outside, all of these voices are just "voices".  But did you know that they're not all stored in the same way in ROM? 2 banks (A, B) are stored as native FS1R voices (608 bytes each) .  The same as the bulk dump format, but without sysex header/footer.  That's 152KB for 256 voices . 9 banks (C - K) are stored in native DX7 VCED format (155 bytes each) .  This is the format that a real DX7 can emit/consume directly. That's 174KB for 1152 voices . Most voices are stored in DX7 format.  The FS1R converts these on the fly when you select a voice. When you do a bulk-dump, you get a converted patch. The FS1R also accepts these DX7 VCED patches via MIDI . The FS1R also accepts DX7 ACED via MIDI.  ACED is an extension to VCED, adding stuff like pitch envelop scaling. Note that there is no ACED in the FS1R ...

Frist post1!

Hi, I'm Wouter van Nifterick. I've decided to create a blog instead of posting in different forums like Facebook groups.  This way I can keep things in one place, and it allows for some more advanced layouts for posts.  There will be a random mix of topics here, but mostly related to technology, software development, and music production.  Enjoy!  Wouter