Before explaining how I made this and where to go from here, it’s probably a good idea to first meet the synth:
You can choose between four sound waves (sine, square, triangle and saw) or white noise from the top buttons. The “Amplitude” slider controls the amplitude of the wave and “Pitch” controls the frequency. “Moogcut” controls the frequency cutoff of the sound and “Moogres” controls the resonance.
The visualizer (which I’ll also explain in a later post) can show the sound in either the frequency (”freq”) or time (”wave”) domains. For those not familiar with the nature of audio synthesis, a lot can be learned by looking at how the visual representation of sound is changed by just messing with the sliders. For example, the odd partials (octave multiples of sound’s fundamental frequency) of the square wave come out very nicely in the frequency domain representation. As you lower the cutoff frequency value, the amplitudes of the higher partials accordingly decrease. Cool!!!!
The number in the lower left corner of the synth is the current frame rate of your Flash player. If it is below around 30-ish, chances are the sound will come out a bit choppy because the computer isn’t filling the audio buffer fast enough. Quitting other apps, closing other brower windows and buying that new MacBook Pro you’ve been dreaming about may all help it run faster and smoother.
The source code for this is coming soon. I just need to clean up my code, install Flash CS3 (I developed this with the Flash 9 AS 3 preview) and make sure everything still works...
