Imox Respiro / modelled wind instruments

[Piet De Ridder]

I'm not particularly chauvinistic, but knowing that IMOX, the creators of Respiro, are fellow countrymen did make me press the purchase button a little quicker than I otherwise would have. What also helped is that the introductory price is only €56.

Respiro is a monophonic physical modelling synth that does wind instruments. None of them sound very close to any real wind instrument — there are no believable flutes, clarinets, oboes, bassoons or brass instruments here —, but they *do* sound like wind instruments and I see excellent use (as do most of the demo makers) for the Respiro patches in any music that requires less-familiar-sounding or difficult-to-identify wind instruments like, say, medieval or renaissance music, or ethnic-oriented material. Or anything really where some unusual wind-alike sounds fit well within the arrangement.
(Come to think of it, Wallander's WIVI, the woodwinds and saxes of which are also not always the most realistic, is, for the exact same reason, also very good for that kind of thing.)



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[Guy Rowland]

Yes, interesting.... from the demos this is the best one I heard:



Most of the others feel a little uncanny valley, either too flat or too digital to be really pleasing. However this tips over more into a genuine hybrid of real and synthesis for me, and its pretty great. Is there more like this sort of thing, Piet? Is there control over the sound to make it more / less synthetic, or is it presets and effects really?

And this is nicely odd:



(tangent - your command of English is always so perfect Piet, but have to ask - do you mean "chauvanistic" in the first sentence? Maybe I've always had the meaning of the word wrong....)

[Piet De Ridder]

No, I meant chauvinistic, Guy. When I google 'chauvanistic' (which I didn't know existed), I always get referred to pages that tell me what 'chauvinistic' means. Maybe there's a spelling deviation at large in Rowland County?

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[Guy Rowland]

No, I meant chauvinistic, Guy. When I google 'chauvanistic' (which I didn't know existed), I always get referred to pages that tell me what 'chauvinistic' means. Maybe there's a spelling deviation at large in Rowland County?

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And there we are - further proof were it needed that people in other countries speak better English than I do. I never heard it used in this context, but you're quite correct.

Meanwhile, what degree of control do you have on the sound-sculpting, Piet?

[Piet De Ridder]

Respiro appears — after, it has to be said, only a few hours of toying with it — not quite the pleasant surprise I hoped it would be. I don't regret the purchase, but it *is* a bit of a disappointment. Timbrally, it's surprisingly limited for a physical modelling synth — the patches all sound very same-ish, even when they don't — and the small number of available parameters only allow you to tickle, not even scratch, the surface.
Also, I think that with this type of synth, the user should be given much more control over how the instrument responds to midi-input. While you can assign a midi control number to the parameters, you can not specify the amount of control — a true controller matrix would be most welcome — and there are a few incomprehensible omissions: velocity is absent, as is aftertouch ...

As with all too many physical modelling synths that have preceded it, Respiro seems like a project undertaken by a few geeky individuals locked away, far from the real world, in an underground science lab or something. The GUI is quite awful — cheap Windows software of the nineties, is how I can best describe it — and immediately feeds the impression that you're handling a beta-version of a retro toy rather than a serious, new instrument. In place of the feeling that you've bought a sophisticated, pioneering tool with which to explore unchartered new sonic territories, it feels more like you just took several steps back in time to the days when software looked, felt and behaved clumsily and cheesily.

Still, I'm definitely going to use Respiro in a few pieces. Even though the software is still far removed from what I hoped it would be, it certainly is capable of a few inspirational sounds.

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[Guy Rowland]

Ah ok, thanks Piet, think I'll swerve it for now. Velocity absent as a controller is, um, bizarre...