I’ve spent the past few days investigating audio synthesis to decide what to tackle on with Fnk. It’s not my intention to create a full-fledged, high-fidelity audio synthesizer – there are already many platforms available for that, all of them created by people who know a lot more about sound than me – but I still want to make it possible for designers to create new audio out of nothing but numbers.

On the theoretical side, one of my biggest references so far has been Miller Puckette‘s free online book, The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music (Puckette being the guy who created Max/MSP and PureData, of course). Another obligatory reading has been Richard F. Moore‘s Elements of Computer Music, although I have to admit much of it has been well over my rudimentary understanding of sound theory.

On the practical side, I’ve been looking for examples of what’s possible in Actionscript 3, so I can find out what’s actually possible inside the platform. André Michelle‘s experiments with audio have been particularly interesting, having shown me that sound synthesis is possible at least to some degree (there are some caveats to Actionscript’s implementation of dynamically-generated sound, but also some experiments that show how it can still be done). This framework also looks promising and has a nice sample-based example to show what the guy wants to do. Something to look into in the future, specially if it goes Open Source (so it could be used inside Fnk).

As a further example of what’s possible inside Flash, check this music editor, mentioned on the previous link.

Within Fnk, audio synthesis support will probably be something pretty low level, allowing people to create waves and such and tweaking their properties. Again, it won’t try to be anything like this, but it’ll try to create some tools that make a bit of that possible by giving people the modules to create some complex systems (as long as they understand what they’re doing).