Hacker News Reader

Comment by blendergeek | Hacker News Reader

Can someone give me a short explanation as to what this is and why it is significant?

It looks quite interesting. I am basically looking for the ELI5 because I have never heard of a DX7 before and I don't know what the file that I was prompted to download was about.

View on HN

FM synthesisers like the DX7 are notoriously difficult to program compared to other types. There are many parameters to tweak and it can be hard to get an intuition about how each will change the sound. There's also a wide subspace of the possible parameter settings that sounds very bad/not musical.

This project seems to take a bunch of manually designed presets that sound good and use them to train a model on what sounds good, so it can make up new presets.

It appears to generate ROM (cartridge) images, which I'm guessing are sound patches, for a vintage Yamaha FM synthesizer -- A model which was extremely popular and ubiquitous a few decades ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_DX7

Notably, there are a crapload of software synths emulating DX7—as exemplified by the two mentioned on the page—and at least some of them accept patches in its native format, so apparently there's an ‘ecosystem’ of sorts of these patches floating around.

The file format that it downloads (.syx) is a MIDI sysex or system-exclusive message file (https://www.midi.org/specifications-old/item/table-4-univers...). These are basically scripts of MIDI instructions that exist outside the regular note on-off messages, and can be used for a variety of things, in this case programming a patch in the DX7’s synthesis engine.

If you scroll down a bit there's more info: https://www.thisdx7cartdoesnotexist.com/#faq

Reply on news.ycombinator.com