Sound categorisation

In his Traite des objets musicaux Pierre Schaeffer (1966) purports to define criteria for the identification and classification of sounds according to their general features. Although Schaeffer was not explicitly concerned with sound synthesis itself, his work provides an excellent insight into making sound categorisations. One of the most important aspects of his theoretical work is the concept of maintenance, which involves the relationship between both criteria discussed above the basic spectral formation and mode of excitation. 

Figure 6.1 The two-axis diagram inspired by Pierre Schaeffer s concept of sound maintenance is an exceiient exampie of a framework for sound categorisation...

The two-axis diagram in Figure 6.1 is an example of a starting point for the design of synthesis instruments. It provides an excellent framework for sound categorisation and encourages the specification of meaningful synthesis parameters e.g. the bandwidth of the BPF mentioned above controls the mass of the sound. 

The development of the alternative taxonomy departs from a framework for sound categorisation inspired by Pierre Schaeffer s (1966) concept of sound maintenance (Figure 6.1) and to some extent by an article written by Jean-Claude Risset in the book Le timbre ... 

This is indeed a very simplistic way of categorising sounds. Nevertheless, it can be a good starting point if you can fit the sounds you want to synthesise into one of these three categories. This will help you to establish which techniques will be more appropriate to produce them. For example ... 

Miranda, E. R., Correa, J. and Wright, J. (2000). Categorising complex dynamic sounds. Organised Sound, 5, 2, 95-102. 

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