I guess this is what sticks in my craw. They say that’s what they’re doing. That’s what people who have reviewed it say it’s doing. But in practice they’ve just added five built-in oscilloscopes, and I don’t get how that helps?
Now, in subtractive, oscilloscopes can be quite handy because you start with mildly complex shapes and then filter off their pointy bits to arrive at your sound. Having a picture of this happening can help you build intuition for the process.
But in FM, you start with a sine and then immediately enter “unknown shape” territory. Like, what does this sound like?
What do you get when you modulate it with this?
The answer, I suppose, is this:
But tell me, what does that sound like? Is it clear, glassy? buzzy? bell like? harmonic? inharmonic? Like an organ? Like an oboe? I’m pretty experienced looking at oscilloscopes compared to the average person and I don’t know.
And what’s worse, there’s no way to build up intuition for this. Waveforms past a certain complexity don’t have common shapes or shared properties for us to grab on to and pattern match by (that’s why Fourier transforms are such a huge deal). The developer as much as says so in the video above saying they avoided numbers in the UI so people would have to edit it by “Changing it and listening rather than looking.”
Then hastily adds, “But also looking at the beautiful graphics!” And, again, nothing wrong with wanting beautiful graphics. But this whole approach perpetuates the myth of FM being this big, mysterious, unknowable thing that all you can do is just randomly change some parameters and, like anything can happen? Maybe it’s a bell lol shrug
But it’s not unknowable at all! Ironically, looking at numbers it’s pretty easy to build an intuition for how your changes will affect a sound. FM is a numbers game of ratios and indexes, after all. Throw in a spectrum analyzer, and FM becomes downright intuitive.
But that wouldn’t be beautiful so that’s not what they’re doing, so it all feels very form-over-function which is a shame and kind of grinds my gears.
To be fair, they have developed an intuitive way to visualize envelopes. I just don’t know that was the part of the process anyone was having trouble wrapping their head around.
)