For anyone interested, here is the page that explains the technique used for arduino sound synthesis that I am using in my systh.

He claims to use a triangle wave grain...whatever that means...

http://code.google.com/p/tinkerit/wiki/Auduino

There's a video of my synth on my blog for anyone who hasn't already seen it.

http://noiseislife.tumblr.com/

i believe it means he's using a saw tooth wave form, but he's not using audio terminology that i'm familiar with. (i'm more from audio engineering than electronics, so that could be the difference, and i'm a bit rusty)

as i understand it you have:
wave a frequency
wave a decay
wave b frequency
wave b decay
repeat interval

i'm unclear on if decay is actually amplitude or frequency.

it seems like a bit of overkill to use a processor to generate that, but i'm better at putting electronic things together than the code or electronics theory.

Point me in a direction of how you think such a thing should be accomplished.

stuff i had bookmarked that may be useful....

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2034542/Do-It ... alog-synth

http://www.cgs.synth.net/

http://www.synth.net/

it seems like music from space or music from the heart of space rings a bell too.

long story short you generate a sin wave, and then through various processes shape it, and then layer it through various filters.

you may want to look into 808 circuits too (old drum machines) they're pretty slick.

(i took a grad course in electronic music theory a while back, so things are a bit foggy, but the concepts are still there)

Cool, thanks for the links.

That reminds me I was going to post some circuit bending stuff.

Edit: Music From Outer Space - I have looked here before briefly, been meaning to get back to it, thanks for the reminder.

if you're going to play with synths you really should look up tracker software, the musical progeny of the demo scene out of the cracker scene. its not so much teh roots of analog synth, but the real roots of computer synth as music.

i'm a fan of impluse, although fast tracker was a big one too. a lot of affiliated early computer synth stuff included some really sharp wave generators and manipulators where you could pick the wave form (square, saw, sin) and how you manipulated it and realy start to understand what the circuits were going.

About the only synth/sequencer software I've played with is Audio Mulch which is very cool, too cheap to pay for it though (not that it's expensive, just have better things to spend money on).

A friend of mine just turned me on to this: http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~lanterma/ece4803/

There is a huge wealth of information there I have started watching the lectures, and I am looking forward to watching more.

So far it is absolutely fantastic, Oh do I wish I would have been able to take a class like this back at university.

This looks cool.

http://www.renoise.com/

renoise looks to be a tracker software. i didn't realize anyone was still playing with it. cool.

claiming it's got a unique approach though is sorta like claiming vista is unique because it's got a gui..... there are dozens of programs that used that. scream, impulse, fast, pro, digi, multi....