The first 36 harmonics

Sine Machine’s UI usually only gives you direct access to you the first 36 harmonics.

Don’t worry, under the hood, you have 500 per voice working for you.

Only 36 are shown in the UI for a few reasons:

• The lower the harmonic, the more it matters.
• It’s really tedious to edit hundreds of things.
• An actual note played could have 1 or 500 harmonics — the UI is an abstraction in most cases.

Given these truths, I made the (arbitrary but informed) decision to help people out by highlighting the first 36, as they’ll be the most important 99% of the time you are playing.

Geek details below:

The lower the harmonic, the more it matters

Psychoacoustics consistently demonstrates that the lower the harmonic number, the more it “matters” to the DNA of a sound. In other words, editing the 63rd partial is probably a waste of your time.

Additive synths often give you individual amplitude control over the 64th or 128th or even 256th partials. Wow! So much power!

This sounds cool on paper, but can actually be unhelpful musically, as it misdirects efforts and attention.

Humans cannot even individually “hear out” harmonics after the 5-10th (depending on training). Andrew Oxenham says it best:

The higher-numbered harmonics, which do not produce individual peaks of excitation and cannot typically be heard out, are often referred to as being “unresolved.” The transition between resolved and unresolved harmonics is thought to lie somewhere between the 5th and 10th harmonic…

But of course these higher harmonics still matter! We obviously do want our sounds to go up to nyquist and be rich in harmonics.

To help out, Sine Machine does a lot of work under the hood, for example extrapolating all higher odd/even harmonic volumes based on the values in the UI.

The UI may not give you direct access to harmonic #345’s volume, but all harmonics in Sine Machine, — all 500 per voice — have independent pitch, volume, and their own LFOs.

It’s tedious to edit 500 things

Some versions of Sine Machine actually let you edit all 500 harmonics.

But ultimately Sine Machine is a synth, not an excel spreadsheet or scientific tool.

Although I understand the nerdy impulse to drop down to data entry to perfectly model some real life sound, the first goal is to be a playable instrument that helps you make cool sounds.

A note could have 1 or 500 harmonics

Only the lowest notes on a keyboard will actually make use of 500 harmonics.

Notes played will have anywhere from 1 to 500 harmonics, depending on how high the fundamental is.

For example at a 44,100kHz sample rate, a note would have to be lower than 88Hz (under E2) can make use of 500 harmonics.