Yet another synthesis technique? Aren't there enough out there already?

There are indeed a few synthesis techniques on the market, but in our opinion, none of them achieved all the goals we were pursuing: we wanted this product to be not only powerful, versatile and expressive, but also intuitive, easy to learn and quick to program. Our objectives: build a synthesizer where controls would be:

• Perceptually meaningful, to make sound programming an intuitive and quick process (unlike FM for instance)
• Continuous, so any characteristic of the sound can be modulated and evolve over time (unlike virtual analog or sample based synths for instance, where the character of the sound mostly relies on selectors: waveform and filter type), for unparalleled power and expressiveness.

This led us to design UFO... Did we meet our goals? We hope so. Indeed, UFO is:

Innovative: it is built upon original algorithms, rather than an existing synthesis technique

Versatile, flexible and expressive: most parameters are continuous and can be modulated by many sources at once. You can apply envelopes and LFOs to virtually anything, have the velocity and aftertouch drastically alter the timbre or to turn a sound into a completely different one with the modulation wheel (“morphing” feature).

Simple and intuitive: its parameters are either easy-to-understand perceptual attributes (mellow, chaotic, harmonic, noise...) or familiar controls (attack time, LFO delay...)

Fast and easy to program: you don't need many synthesis modules (thanks to their versatility) to build complex sounds, and the ergonomics of the user interface has been carefully designed.

Under the hood: TransModal Synthesis^TM

Thanks to Audeon's strong background in signal processing and algorithm design, we came up with a set of innovative and flexible synthesis algorithms gathered under the name “TransModal Synthesis”. The name comes from the fact that instead of operating in several distinct modes, these synthesis modules can perform smooth transitions between their oscillation modes (periodic, chaotic, random, etc) or their filtering mode (low-pass, high-pass, etc). This capability makes them much more flexible and expressive than synthesis modules with waveform or filter type selectors for instance.

TransModal Synthesis algorithms include:

K-Osc^TM: named after a contraction of "Chaos" and "Oscillator", K-Osc is a powerful and versatile Chaotic Oscillator Model where the user controls the sound characteristics by balancing perceptual attributes like Mellowness, Brightness, Periodicity, Noisiness, Chaos or Transient duration. These high level controls drive the low level model parameters in order to favor one oscillation mode or another.

Morphilter^TM: it can be a low-pass, a high-pass or a peaking filter, but also anything in between: you can make it evolve smoothly over time from one shape to another for more complex sound transformations than the usual cutoff frequency sweep.

A few other synthesis modules are also available: vector synthesis oscillator (waveform interpolation), ring modulator, formant filters, effects...

Sound programming made easy 

A good synthesis engine is nothing without a good user interface to go with. We designed UFO's interface with two goals in mind:

• Make programming fast, by minimizing the number of required mouse clicks
• Make programming easy, by offering meaningful controls and a global and intuitive way of displaying them

Thanks to this interface, combined with the underlying synthesis algorithms, programming a sound is quick and intuitive.