Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics

Abstract: Sound synthesis has been a central pursuit in computer music research since its earliest days, giving rise to a lineage of techniques — from FM and wavetable synthesis to physical modeling and spectral methods — that have shaped the landscape of the field for decades. What these approaches share is a common epistemology: synthesis as a programmatic act, governed by explicit parameters that encode human knowledge about the physics of sound production, the structure of musical instruments, or the perceptual properties of timbre. Control is legible, but the space of sounds reachable through parameter manipulation is ultimately bounded by the model's expressivity.