Frequency modulation is a commonly used technique in electric engineering applications and almost 20 years ago, Yamaha introduced the famous DX7 using FM-synthesis also for sound generation. The OPL3-chip perfoming most of the sound generation work was later also available in recent sound cards of the 90tees and made this type of sound synthesis very popular.

Here I am using a similar algorithm with 6 so called operators to affect the frequency generation with modulation and offset values.

The 6 processes operate the same way except channel 1 which is not fed by the former stage but has a feedback from it's output.

The outputs can be mixed together to sum up to mono and stereo channels.

Also the chaining can be changed to emulate the well known setups of the FM-modules.

dsp-platform

I am using a TMS320-System from Texas Instruments.

This high speed DSP system is able to produce several voices at 44100 the same time.

fm-synthesis equations

This section has been removed to avoid possible patent vaiolations.

Sound Demos of synthesized music

Listen to a demo sound here : FMSYNTH