YAMAHA XG DevZone Library

MU100 Voice In-depth Info

Session 2: The Composition of MU100 Voices Part 1

Now we are going to get into a serious discussion about technology. For the MU100, there are two types of voices, those on the built-in ROM and those from the Plug-in boards.

Creating voices

The voices stored in the MU100 are played on the tone generation system using AWM (Advanced Wave Memory) technology. AWM is considered to be compatible to a standard generally known as PCM (Pulse Code Modulation). In this session, we are going to look into each step of the voice creation process. This series of processes can be quickly outlined as follows:

1) Sampled waveforms are reduced in size.

2) A new waveform is created combining up to two reduced waveforms.

3) A voice is created using this waveform through defining EG, Filter and other parameters.

Keywords

Reducing the waveform size (processing of waveforms)

You might have seen the term waveform ROM in some sound module brochures before. Engineers burn waveforms onto ROMs (Read Only Memory) so that they can be played on sound modules or synthesizers. However, raw waveform data containing sampled sounds is so massive that it can't fit into ROM (which is often limited by cost and component size factors). Consequently, the waveforms must be made several times smaller than the raw data. There are four ways of reducing waveform size.

(Please see the next page for more about the four methods for reducing the waveform data size.)

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