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🧠 Claude Prompt Stub: Design & Architecture

Here's a Claude-friendly prompt to expand or refine:

I'm designing a next-gen additive/FM synthesizer called Caelux, derived from my existing synth Caelus (based on Pyo) but built for clustered processing and cinematic surround sound.

Here's the architecture:

  • The system is a single-controller, multi-worker cluster.
  • The controller handles:
    • Incoming MIDI and OSC
    • GUI (Qt), audio playback, and wave file export
    • Distributing OSC commands to the workers and receiving audio buffers in return
  • Workers:
    • Receive OSC commands
    • Render "particles," each consisting of 7 highly optimized FM/additive oscillators
    • Each oscillator is structured as: FM INT > Ramp > ADSR > Oscillator > Delay > Panner > Feedback
    • Outputs are multichannel surround

Help me document this architecture and evolve it over time. Today, let’s focus only on the oscillator signal flow and how a particle routes its 7 operators to generate 8-channel output.

📄 Design Document: Caelux – A Clustered Cinematic Synthesizer

Overview

Caelux is a distributed additive/FM synthesizer designed for immersive surround sound synthesis, particularly for cinematic sound design. It builds upon concepts from Caelus, but with a fundamentally different architecture.

At its core, Caelux uses a clustered controller–worker model:

  • The controller handles:
    • MIDI and OSC input/output
    • Wave file rendering and live audio output
    • A Qt-based local GUI
    • Routing and timing of OSC commands to workers
    • Receiving rendered audio buffers back from workers
  • The workers are responsible for:
    • Receiving and parsing OSC messages from the controller
    • Rendering audio by processing multiple particles
    • Each particle is a self-contained additive+FM structure consisting of 7 tightly interlinked oscillators

Each oscillator is highly optimized for parallelism (multiprocessing, Numba, etc.) and has a dedicated processing pipeline.

🎛 Oscillator Design: Modular Signal Path

Each oscillator in Caelux is a highly optimized, standalone unit responsible for generating and spatializing a single stereo voice. Oscillators are fully parallelizable and leverage multiprocessing, Numba, and vectorized math where possible.

🔁 Signal Chain (Per Oscillator)

csharp


CopyEdit
[FM Intensity Mod] 
     ↓
[Frequency/Amplitude Ramp] 
     ↓
[ADSR Envelope] 
     ↓
[Harmtable Oscillator] 
     ↓
[Stereo Multitap Delay] 
     ↓
[Stereo Panner (LFO-Controlled)] 
     ↓
[Output Stereo Pair]

📦 Component Definitions

Component Description
FM Intensity Mod Scalar control of incoming frequency modulation amount from a parent oscillator.
Ramp Generator Independent for frequency and amplitude. Applies linear or exponential transitions (e.g. pitch glides, fade-ins/outs).
ADSR Envelope Extended Attack, Decay, and Sustain stages allow for slow ambient evolutions.
Harmtable Oscillator High-resolution wavetable (default sine), optimized for additive and FM usage.
Stereo Delay Multitap, long delay support with feedback per channel. Can simulate echoes, rhythmic accents, or diffusion.
Stereo Panner Uses a harmonic LFO to animate stereo position across assigned output pair.
Feedback Routing Mono send of output back into FM input, enabling feedback modulation. Configurable per oscillator.

🌌 Particle Structure: 7-Oscillator FM Network

Each particle is a self-contained 7-operator additive+FM unit. Operators are chained to form a nested FM tree with 4 final audio-producing oscillators.

🧬 FM Routing Topology

OP1 → OP2, OP3 (FM modulation only)
OP2 → OP4, OP6
OP3 → OP5, OP7
  • OP1–OP3 are modulator-only (not heard directly)
  • OP4–OP7 produce the final audio output

🔊 Surround Output Mapping

Each output oscillator sends audio to a stereo pair with spatial panning. Here's the final surround mapping:

Oscillator Output Channels Panning Behavior Purpose
OP4 Out 1–2 FL ↔ FR Main stereo anchor
OP5 Out 3–4 FL ↔ CL Supports center imaging
OP6 Out 5–6 FR ↔ CR Balances left-field with right motion
OP7 Out 7–8 Rear → Ceiling (mono pan) Adds Z-axis dimension; shimmer, lift

🎧 Total Outputs: 8 channels (7.1 or 7.0.2 without LFE).

Each particle’s outputs can be positioned in surround space statically, dynamically (via panning), or sequenced over time.