just a generic question,
all the oscillators, how is it produced in the first place?

a digital signal is converted to an analogue electrical signal on the soundcard, which interferes with magnetic fields in a speaker in such a way as to make all the sounds. Audio synthesis is programming, orchestrating, controlling speaker cone position.

and if you're talking about the [osc~] object in pd, then it just looks up a table of (i think) 1024 values which represent a perfect sine wave (or cosine wave, or whatever), and then interpolates between those values to make a smooth wave.

i'm guessing [phasor~] just uses a simple accumulative expression with a modulus wraparound to form a repeating ramp.

[noise~] is just random numbers fired at sample rate and scaled -1 to 1

@mod said:

and if you're talking about the [osc~] object in pd, then it just looks up a table of (i think) 1024 values which represent a perfect sine wave (or cosine wave, or whatever), and then interpolates between those values to make a smooth wave.

Just being a bit pedantic here, but it actually uses 512 points and linear interpolation. So you can get a better sinewave using sinesum and [tabosc4~] or [tabread4~].

@Maelstorm said:

Just being a bit pedantic here, but it actually uses 512 points and linear interpolation.

Really? That's pretty crappy!