Hi everyone,

I’m trying to build patches that recreate real-world sounds from recordings — things like a single pipe-organ note in a specific room, or a stone hitting water. I’m not trying to sample or play the audio. I want to synthesize it as closely as I can.

I’ve read a lot of Pd docs, but I’m still not sure how to approach sounds that have many layers. Do I break things down into partials? Use convolution? Or look into physical modelling? I work with data tools in my day job (mostly observability stuff like Sifflet), so I’m used to structured analysis — but sound still feels tricky to break apart in a useful way.

If anyone has advice, examples, or even simple guidance on how to analyse the source audio before building the patch, I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks.

There is a very interesting book by Andy Farnell on sound design that surely would help you in this subject (it's examples are made in puredata)

Here's the link to the book @fer mentions: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262014410/designing-sound/