SYNTHBOT: AN UNSUPERVISED SOFTWARE SYNTHESIZER PROGRAMMER
Matthew John Yee-King, Martin M. Roth · 2009
This work presents a software synthesizer programmer, SynthBot, which is able to automatically find the settings necessary to produce a sound similar to a given target. As modern synthesizers become more capable and the underlying synthesis architectures more obscure, the task of programming them to produce a desired sound becomes more time consuming and complex. SynthBot is presented as an automated solution to this problem. A stochastic search algorithm, in this case a genetic algorithm, is used to find the parameters which produce the most similar sound to the target. Similarity is measured by the sum squared error between the Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCCs) of the target and candidate sounds. The system is evaluated technically to establish its ability to effectively search the space of possible parameter settings. A pilot study is then described where musicians compete with SynthBot to see who is the most competent synthesizer programmer, where each competitor rates the other using their own metrics of sound similarity. The outcome of these tests suggest that the system is an effective ”composer’s assistant”. 1.