It’s morphin’ time!
One of the most interesting aspects of spectral or additive synthesisers is their ability to analyse a sound and then recreate it as a collection of sine waves that vary over time. A sound resynthesised in this manner is no longer a static recording, but rather a complete additive synthesis patch. Some additive synths therefore allow the user to resynthesise a pair of sounds and then interpolate – ie, morph – between the pair at will. Not to be mistaken with a mere crossfade, this sort of transformation is more like a macro function that adjusts every parameter simultaneously over time. This allows for wildly creative applications, like morphing a human wail into an animal’s howl, or musical patches that interpolate between different instruments over a range of notes.
Once the sole domain of costly sound design systems like Symbolic Sound Corporation’s Kyma, morphing is now available in inexpensive plugins such as Image-Line’s Morphine.