Welcome to the Bezier Synthesis Home Page

What is Bezier Synthesis?

• Bezier Synthesis is a technique for the direct generation of waveforms using a Bezier curve for each wave.
• Bezier curves are widely used in many drawing and graphical packages, such as Star Office and Flash.
• Bezier synthesis uses a single Bezier curve to “draw” a waveform, which is output as a series of digital samples to the sound card of the computer. Since a single Bezier curve can take a wide variety of shapes, so a large number of different sounds can be created.

The technique can be further expanded by applying “modulation” frequencies which rapidly change the shape of the curve whilst the synthesis is taking place. This makes Bezier synthesis capable of generating a huge number of new and exciting sounds.

Is Bezier Synthesis similar to other techniques?

Bezier synthesis is somewhat similar to the well known synthesis techniques of Amplitude (AM), Frequency (FM) and Phase Modulation (PM), but each of these techniques is based on a simple sine wave and only allows one modulation frequency at a time; in contrast, the basic Bezier wave shape can take a huge variety of forms, and allows four simultaneous and separate modulation frequencies. This makes the Bezier Sythesizer very flexible and powerful.

Animated Presentation

Click here for an animated presentation of Bezier Synthesis

Software Download

A trial version of the software has been written as a Java application and is available for download for the following platforms:

• Macintosh OS X
• Windows XP/2000/NT

(The software will probably work with Linux too, but I haven't tried it)

Publication

The Bezier Synthesis technique was presented at the 116th conference of the Audio Engineering Society in May 2004, and a short paper published in the proceedings of that conference. I have a small number of re-prints of the paper available for bona fide academic and industrial researchers and research students. Please email me at the address below.