January 1, 2023

Sound Synthesis with L-Systems

Happy 2023. My latest blog post is about a way to synthesize weird sounds with Lindenmayer systems:

An Approach to Sound Synthesis with L-Systems | Nathan Ho

An early obsession of mine when I was first learning about music tech was a paper by Stelios Manousakis titled “Non-Standard Sound Synthesis with L-Systems,” published 2009 in Leonardo Music Journal.

The results sound only alright in my book, but I think with a more advanced granular synthesis engine this research could form the basis for something really cool and expressive.

I also made a lot of music in SuperCollider over the holidays, including this Richard Devine-inspired beat from yesterday:

The highs are a Shepard-Risset tone, the bass sounds are a mixture of IXA synthesis and subtractive synthesis with wavefolding and sample rate reduction, and there’s a lot of SC’s PitchShift in there.