Wave Terrain Lite

[gospodindilly-ops]

Another interesting technique is Wave Terrain Synthesis.

Instead of reading a 1D waveform, a trajectory moves through a 2D waveform/terrain and the terrain height becomes the audio signal.

It can create very unusual evolving digital/organic timbres from relatively simple mathematical surfaces.

A full implementation is computationally expensive because the terrain and trajectory can be calculated per sample:

https://github.com/aaronaanderson/Terrain

But I think a Lite version could be practical for FM-1:

32×32 terrain LUT + cheap trajectory + interpolation

There is also a simple interactive implementation/demo:

https://github.com/deermichel/waveterrain

This could be a very distinctive new oscillator if the CPU cost is low enough.