Music Technology
Your Synth Has 70 Knobs. A New Method Can Tell You Which Ones Actually Matter.
A paper submitted to the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society proposes a two-stage framework for ranking software-synthesizer parameters by how much they actually affect the audio output. The Sweep Test scores each parameter by spectral deviation across a 101-step sweep; an independent Sobol variance test checks that ranking. Across five synthesizers (TorchSynth, Pyo, Pedalboard, Csound, FluidSynth) with 48 to 76 parameters each, the two methods agree strongly (Spearman ρ up to 0.96) on every engine that renders deterministically.