Overtones, harmonics and Additive synthesis
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- čas přidán 11. 09. 2024
- Overtones are the basic building block of sound. Come and learn how to construct sounds at www.synthschool...
This video is about additive synthesis, and how sounds can be constructed by pure sine waves. If you are a musician or sound engineer, this video is a must for you!
On our site there is also a download for the harmonic explorer, which is the device used to create this video. so you can explore for yourself!
thats a damn good summary of frequencies.
ugh
In terms of giving the kind of clear, easy-to-understand explanation of the process of waves and harmonic overtones, this is the best tutorial I have experienced. Well done.
there is hardly any other synth sound as satisfying as a sine wave that continuously becomes more and more of a saw wave by adding harmonics
"satisfying"
this is by far the best ive ever seen
@WARDISWARD
What i meant was that harmonics occur naturally...
However, sine waves occur naturally too. Just like circles and balls occur naturally (soap bubble, planets orbits, and so on) however those are usually not as pure as synthesized sine waves.
I agree the sentence came out linguistically wrong, but I'm a synth teacher, not an english teacher :)
Excellent accurate graphics, accurate generators, accurate reproduction, and accurate , easy to understand and clear description and tutorial! Just what the doctor ordered.
I remember watching this video when I was like 14 and barely learning what audio engineering or synthesis was and it helped so much. Thank you for kickstarting my interest in the one thing I'm good at. :p
As a student of signal processing and a long-time musician, nice work! Very clear and still simple.
I am human and i find that synthesized sounds are very pleasing to my human ears ;)
SynthSchool is it possible to use this tool or download it anywhere?
Hi, why your website is not working anymore?
THIS is a good video, exactly what I've been looking for. Everything else I've found is riddled with irrelevant information, doesn't tell me anything new, and doesn't answer my questions. Very well done!
@soundsalvo You do make a valid point and it is one that many people could easily confuse, but it does depend on what you mean by 'slower.' Lower frequencies ARE slower wave oscillations compared to higher frequencies. But as you mean to point out, ALL sounds--regardless of their frequency, travel through the same medium or environment at the same speed. In this video, he does not actually say that the sound is travelling slower to our ears, but it is true that he could have been more clear.
Thanks for this man. You answered a few questions ive always wondered in my head.
Same for me
Unreal. I feel like I've always known this stuff. Had synths for years and years. Now high pass filter makes sense. It takes out the harmonics (in the first saw example)!
Do you often wonder in your head?
@@jamienliston9072 I mostly wonder in code that runs in my lymphatic system
THIS IS THE BEST EXPLANATION OF SOUNDWAVE AND HARMONICS EVER!!!!!!!!
This is one of my FAVORITE videos EVER.
Excellent basic sound wave tutorial. I'm a vocalist and though I've learned about the basics of sound (overtones, harmonics, etc), I've never seen it put so simply like this. Having visual and audio reference makes all the difference. Thank you.
Wow! I had an epiphanic moment when you compared the osciloscope's positive and negative values to that position of the speaker's membrane! Thank you so much!
Wow. I just spent the last couple hours trying to learn this, and your video was the one that helped me understand! Thank you!
Great video! I'm not even a musician, I just fell down the internet vortex of curiosity, and your explanation was very clear!
Hello, try VCV RACK, is an analog/digital modular sintesizer.
shut up butthead
I'm pretty sure he was talking about the "real musical instruments" the entire time. Everything that produces sound produces a waveform that is built up of a base frequency (sine wave) and varying overtones. This video was not an exercise in reproducing acoustic sound (which has been done quite successfully, by the way). Its purpose was to inform the viewer as to how frequencies interacted to produce common synth sounds. I found it highly informative and interesting.
Thanks - that's a really good intro to harmonics - the basis of music - way more useful place to start than whatever they did in school that was just confusing and ungrounded in how the phenomenon works. Thank you thank you.
best tutorial ever
This is amazing. So clear. Thank you for this. Musicology professors have spoken more and explained less than this video.
This is Fourier series. Great!
Yes yes yes, this is blooddy marvalous, thankyou
Why are people arguing on this thread? Great video, very informative and straight forward. Kudos! I learned something new!
I am a trumpet major and am trying to learn more about overtones and the affect on timbre. This video was very helpful. Thank you.
Finally, I got a good explanation of sine waves and frequencies. Great video.
Kudos to you my friend, you have made a truly excellent educational video here. Thank you very much!!!
This was an absolutely fantastic video, I have been using synths for at least two years but never really understood the basic building blocks of sound until now, this was honestly a humbling experience to watch. :)
@WARDISWARD Sine waves are actually quite common in nature. From the Wikipedia entry: This wave pattern occurs often in nature, including ocean waves, sound waves, and light waves.
It exists, therefor it occurs in nature.
It's not about limiting creativity, it's about creating working models.
can't believe you made this just for the course!! amazing. we want more :)
@DownFlex subtractive synthesis is when you use filters to modify the harmonic series. filters emphasize and/or remove specific harmonics.
Thank you very much!" This is the best explanation of sound I have ever seen! Awesome work!
Amazing tutorial! I wish I would have found this video before my Signals and Systems exam, it could have been so much easier. :S :)
Very well done and explanatory video. Thanks for posting!
square waves are made with sine waves. They include the fundamental(main low frequency). Then its either all odd(1/3/5/7) or even(2/4/6/8...) overtones above it. there's a video explaining how to create a square wave with sine waves somewhere on youtube
Don't forget the exponentials. Any mathematical function (i.e. audio signal) can be built using combinations of sinusoids and exponentials. Good video, thanks for posting.
This was an amazing video, sums up synthesis concisely, and in a way that makes perfect sense! Made me think about how this is applied in organs, which I never really thought about before, but now it makes sense - they're altering what harmonic frequencies are used in the organ! This will really help with my music, thank you so much!
Such a great video. I would recommend it to all musicians period!
the best demo i have ever watched ( relating to the complex nature of the experiment, made dynamically simple) ..best regards to u Sir..
Damn man, you answered so many questions. Keep demystifying! Subscribed!
I like this so much!!
I wish there was a second like button
I love the explanations!! Finally I know now how sawtooth waves and square waves are generated from sine waves!
Took 10 minutes to watch but took all afternoon to understand.I have such a wondering mind that the only way i get these things down is by writing them down slowly,anyway thank you one more piece of the big puzzle.It all helps in the end :)
Excellent! Thanks for the solid tutorial, You totally nailed it, many thumbs up
best representation of harmonics I've seen so far. Thanks.
This is a great example of Fourier's theorem, and how it can be put into practice.
From 5:15 to 5:50, if you had continued adding those harmonics my head would have melted off my shoulders.
actually, harmonic overtones are 100% prominent in playing a guitar. if you are a musician, you SHOULD be fascinated with this type of thing. it's amazing that this occurs in nature.
Actually, as a student of music and math, and (hopefully) a music therapist, studying harmonics may help people like me understand why certain frequencies affect different parts of a human (including body, mind, spirit, etc). This lesson is not a direct link, but could help me build toward that understanding. Thus, it may be completely useless to you as a musician, but then you're not the only person watching ;-)
This particular video is one of the best i have seen so far !! Great work guys and some excellent demonstrations.
Seriously! What a great video! Well explained, demonstrated and easy to follow! Thank you so much!
Cheers!
in reality haydn and händel were very popular in their time. there were no labels at the time, but haydn was the court musician of the wealthy esterházy family and was one of the most celebrated composers in europe. händel became kapellmeister to prince georg of hanover, had a huge public success and ended up being a well respected rich man.
Any sound that humankind can hear has three basic qualities, it's pitch or frequency, it's loudness, and it's tone or timbre, the timbre of a sound, is determined by it's fundamental frequency and all harmonics that are present, a note played on a brass instrument, such as a Trombone will sound different when compared to the same exact note played on a woodwind instrument, such as a Clarinet, both instruments may be playing an A 440Hz note, but notice how much brighter and louder the Trombone sounds in comparison to the Clarinet, and also notice how a Sawtooth wave has a similar bright and brassy timbre like the Trombone, or how a Square wave has a hollow timbre like the Clarinet, Sawtooth wave has a mixture of both odd and even harmonics, whereas the Square wave has mainly odd harmonics in it.
Fare enough. But it never hurts to learn a bit about something you enjoy doing, in or outside of class.
This is a great tool for understanding harmonics and timbre.
It's like I'm preparing for graduation from Singularity School where God teaches it's first Elemental Soul Group how to construct the Cosmos.
lmao, same
Hi
Yes God ( Sound) said Let there be Light.’ The word ‘Sound’ is STILL utilised to express something trustworthy, something that RESONATES! Shalom to us only in Christ Yeshua ( The LIGHT)
Excellent video! Now I understand why same tone on guitar and piano would sound different despite the same frequency (fundamental frequency) . Thanks.
Thank you, SynthShool, for making a really informative video. I definitely plan on checking out your site, as I'd love to know something about synths beyond their sound.
Hi I came from Fl Studio's reference manual, bye :)
Brilliant video. Must be my third time watching it.
Thanks for this, really useful and with all the concepts wall explained in short time.
thkq so much for this wonderful tutorial.this open ups many things to me
(cont.)
If you want to find out all the harmonics of a wave, just multiply the fundamental frequency by 1, 2, 3, etc. If you want to find out all the octaves, multiply the fundamental frequency by 2 and then keep doubling the results you get. This is the same as multiplying the fundamental frequency by powers of twoo (ffreq*2,4,8,16,etc).
One can say that all octaves are harmonics but not all harmonics are octaves.
A sine wave does not describe a circle. It's derived from the y-dimensions of a circle as a function of angle (in radians). If you flipped one half of the sine wave back on itself, it would not form a circle, but something more resembling the shape of an eye. To describe a circle in 2D using sine, you need a parametric equation which uses sine AND cosine. (x=r*cos(t), y=r*sin(t), where r is the radius of the circle)
Very excellent introduction ! BTW relatively highly inharmonic overtones are what makes the piano tone.... (due to stiffness in wire) - and natural overtones cannot make a cycle of 5ths and get back to a pure overtone, hence the "comma" difference that "tempered" occidental tuning divide by 12 (or other means) to get back to a pure frequency multiple at the octave level. (sorry English not native !) Other theories apply as well (as for generation of all notes via partials)
Thanks so much for taking the time to do this video.
Bravo!
this is the best explanation ever ! thank you very much sir !
This is such a great video, my university don’t even teach it! Thank you very much 👍🏻
jeez, you deserve a lot of cash. thanks.
This visual lesson really helped thanks
No wonder saws sound so rich! Great explanation!
It is very interesting to add that elephants use sub-audible (too low frequency for human ear) sounds to communicate eachother and they are slow animals by nature. Just like the low frequency waves. Consider bats on the contrary; they use high pitched sonic pulses, and they're very fast flyers, just like the high frequencies that are fast. Wonder, same thing is applied for the humans too? hehe.
The sound waves that come off of your instrument when you strum a string ARE sine waves, and the specific arrangement of overtones from your instrument create its sound. This is just as applicable to real instruments as to synthesizers. You can call synthesizers "trivial," but the fact is that it's very useful for a modern music producer to know how to use a synthesizer. It's also very useful for a musician to know about overtones. If you're not interested in that, why are you here?
This is amazing. Everything makes sense - THANK YOU SO MUCH
Greetings, I used a small part of this great video in my video "nem indivíduo, nem sociedade: o transindividual". Thank you!
Great explanation and visuals. thank you :)
This is how all tutorials should be done.
very helpful! thank you
thankxxx for sharing man! i love synthesis........
Please open the synth school! Keen!
Very good and easy-to-understand tutorial
This is gold
Well . . . It wasn't a "mistake," per se. I added and shifted around a few characters to make the last sentence more coherent and to my liking. As for not beginning a sentence with "and," there are certain cases where that doesn't apply and I believe that sentence qualifies.
@soundsalvo Good point, slower is not the same as takes more time to evolve.
So easy to understand, great tuto, thank you so much !
this guy has knowledge. he knows what's going on when you strum your fingers. what's the matter?
Beautifully presented... thanks for this!
Midi is a digital communication language standard, and it has nothing to do with how sound works. Look up the "Fourier transform" on Wikipedia . . . it might help you understand how sound and the human ear work.
Thanks for that concise and understandable!
Wow! The best explanation ever! Thanks a lot!
I like the sound of the incomplete sawtooth. The "bells" of each added harmonic seem quite musical. With all the harmonics its the usual harsh buzzing. But it seems to be the low fundamental that starts to "not belong", not the added harmonics. Without musical background, the terminology - octave, minor, fifth, third - seems rather unintuitive, and I'm lost there. I do understand what a third harmonic would be, but not major (larger?) third. An even-only harmonic series makes a strange "smoothed sawtooth".
great presentation--lots of insight
Great Tutorial. Big Thumb !
Brilliant tutorial, thanks!
this is the best video ever ,thanx
this is going to be big, nice one.
Who are the 18 people who don't like this?!?!? Beautiful tutorial!
This is very informative video ....
may be i have seen only once.. i should try practical