Another benefit to harmonic theory is it's intuitive and deep. Since humans find only a
small subset of possible sounds interesting for musical application, subtractive and
additive synthesis has made sound design relatively easy but powerful.

On the other hand, modulation type synthesizers (FM, AM, etc.) are completely non-
intuitive and creating musical sounds with them is difficult.

I suppose someone could create a synthesizer based on something like polynomials - but
associating coefficient values to it's sound is not going to be anywhere near as intuitive as
direct harmonic manipulation.

--- In Doepfer_a100@yahoogroups.com , "Monroe Eskew" <monroe.eskew@...> wrote:
>
> It's not just what's convenient. It may be found by scientific
> investigation to be how the ear actually works. Much work has already been
> done on this. Here is a good starting place for information:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlea
>
> Monroe
>
> On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 7:09 PM, Doug <dougc356@...> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > It seems that we want to believe that the mechanism of hearing
> > involves a decomposition into a trigonometric basis followed by a
> > cognitive synthesis. I'm not sure why this would be, and what this
> > model accomplishes, other than satisfying our urge for reductive
> > analysis armed with the most convenient mathematical language known to
> > us.
> >
> > Doug
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>