Why is D unpopular?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Tuesday, 3 May 2022 at 14:59:12 UTC, claptrap wrote:
> Yeah genius is probably the wrong word, but what I mean is its 
> like that quote about genius being 1% inspiration and 99% 
> perspiration. Focusing on saying the idea was obvious is doing 
> a disservice to whats involved in actually getting it working.

Ok, but in DSP I think many ideas are obvious if you know the 
field, but getting the right mix, the right hacks, the right 
tweaks, getting it to run fast and making it sound good takes a 
lot of effort (or can happen as an accident :-). I certainly 
don't doubt that there are many years of highly skilled effort 
that has gone into the product as it is today. But that is solid 
engineering, not a moment of "wowsers!" :-D


> And to be far almost all human knowledge is built up in layers. 
> Even when someone solves a really hard problem you usually find 
> lots of different people have chipped away at it in different 
> ways.

I think what is special in computer music is that the bottom 
layer is all about human perception of sound. I think knowledge 
at that layer is more impressive than the other layers. Like, the 
technology behind mp3 isn't really all that impressive, what 
makes it impressive is how they used knowledge about human 
perception (our lack of ability to distinguish 
differences/resolutions between certain "sound textures"). When 
developers manage to create new "illusions" based on perceptional 
psychology and create algorithms that exploit that you have 
something special in my eyes (regardless of whether it has any 
practical application).


> See to me that's less impressive, I mean I reckon people were 
> doing FM synthesis with analog hardware already. So it was more 
> likely just a refinement, or exploration, it's actually 
> technically pretty simple.

It is difficult to find any individual discovery that is 
obviously impressive, and I guess putting a sin() into another 
sin() may seem intuitive, given people already used LFOs. I think 
the work he put into making it musically useful and expressive 
creating new types of bell-like sounds is why people emphasis his 
contribution. I find this wiki-quote a bit funny: «This was 
Stanford's most lucrative patent at one time, eclipsing many in 
electronics, computer science, and biotechnology.»

Fooling around with some math expressions paid off! It was 
apparently first made available in Synclavier I, which I find 
interesting, upper high end at the time.


> I mean real time pitch tracking and artifact free pitch 
> shifting are orders of magnitude harder problems than FM 
> synthesis.

Many people worked on that though? It is very much the work of a 
community… In general most things in audio build on something 
else. Like, the concept of vocoders is in some way ingenious, but 
it was invented for speech in telecom by Bell labs in 1930s.