Imagine the sounds: an intuitive control of an impact sound synthesizer

In this paper we present a synthesizer developed for musical and Virtual Reality purposes that offers an intuitive control of impact sounds. A three layer control strategy is proposed for this purpose, where the top layer gives access to a control of the sound source through verbal descriptions, the middle layer to a control of perceptually relevant sound descriptors, while the bottom layer is directly linked to the parameters of the additive synthesis model. The mapping strategies between the parameters of the different layers are described. The synthesizer has been implemented using Max/MSP, offering the possibility to manipulate intrinsic characteristics of sounds in real-time through the control of few parameters.