On the timbre of chaotic algorithmic sounds

Chaotic sound waveforms generated algorithmically are considered to study their timbre characteristics of harmonic and inharmonic overtones, loudness and onset time. Algorithms employed in the present work come from different first order iterative maps with parameters that generate chaotic sound waveforms. The generated chaotic sounds are compared with each other in respect of their waveforms' energy over the same time interval. Interest is focused in the logistic, double logistic and elliptic iterative maps. For these maps, the energy of the algorithmically synthesized sounds is obtained numerically in the chaotic region. The results show that for a specific parameter value in the chaotic region for each one of the first two maps, the calculated sound energy is the same. The energy, though, produced by the elliptic iterative map is higher than that of the other two maps everywhere in the chaotic region. Under the criterion of equal energy, the discrete Fourier transform is employed to compute for the logistic and double logistic iterative maps, a) the generated chaotic sound's power spectral density over frequency revealing the location (frequency) and relative loudness of the overtones which can be associated with fundamental frequencies of musical notes, and b) the generated chaotic sound's frequency dependent phase, which together with the overtones' frequency, yields the overtones' onset time. It is found that the synthesized overtones' loudness, frequency and onset time are totally different for the two generating algorithms (iterative maps) even though the sound's total generated power is equal. It is also demonstrated that, within each one of the iterative maps considered, the overtone characteristics are strongly affected by the choice of initial loudness.