Automatic design of sound synthesizers as pure data patches using coevolutionary mixed-typed cartesian genetic programming

ABSTRACT

A sound synthesizer can be defined as a program that takes a few input parameters and returns a sound. The general sound synthesis problem could then be formulated as: given a sound (or a set of sounds) what program and set of input parameters can generate that sound (set of sounds)? We propose a novel approach to tackle this problem in which we represent sound synthesizers using Pure Data (Pd), a graphic programming language for digital signal processing. We search the space of possible sound synthesizers using Coevolutionary Mixed-typed Cartesian Genetic Programming (MT-CGP), and the set of input parameters using a standard Genetic Algorithm (GA). The proposed algorithm co-evolves a population of MT-CGP graphs, representing the functional forms of synthesizers, and a population of GA chromosomes, representing their inputs parameters. A fitness function based on the Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) evaluates the distance between the target and produced sounds. Our approach is capable of suggesting novel functional forms and input parameters, suitable to approximate a given target sound (and we hope in future iterations a set of sounds). Since the resulting synthesizers are presented as Pd patches, the user can experiment, interact with, and reuse them.

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Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Arts and humanities

    • Sound and music computing