[LAU] Decent soundfonts

[thomas fisher]

On Wednesday 09 January 2008 20:03:40 Ken Restivo wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 12:00:42AM -1000, david wrote:
> > Simon Williams wrote:
> > I've been using and loving the Yamaha audio patches for years. Someone
> > else on the list mentioned that a lot of the Yamaha audio sound is due
> > to the licensing of some very sophisticated wave guide audio patents
> > from MIT or some college like that. I suppose you could read the patents
> > and figure it out, but ...
>
> Wasn't it CCRMA at Stanford?
>
> Converging with the thread about Tapestrea (which uses ChucK), I recall
> seeing license blurbs all over the ChucK source code that mentioned that
> the (now expired, I hope) patents were owned by Yamaha and had been
> developed at Stanford, IIRC.
>
> -ken
  I believe the patents developed at Stanford, if I remember correctly about 
400 in number, was known  as Sondius. Anyway here are some  links:

http://otl.stanford.edu/tech/sondius.html
http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/97/970708staccato.html
http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/97/970709sondiusxg.html

How much of this made its way to market through Yamaha, I do not know. I 
believe the " YMF nnn " series of chips had some this in the firmware. I 
suspect that this may have been part of the problem in Linux audio to really 
support those cards. As I understood it, was while most of the market was 
relying upon samplings, the Yamaha chips were dynamically sound synthesis.
These presumptions, may be not correct.
Hope this helps.
Tom