… Hydrogen Spectra VSTi (preliminary idea) …

For my personal project in my computational physics class, I have decided to create a new VST instrument based on the atomic spectra of the hydrogen atom. Hydrogen is the most fundamental physical element in the universe (not including photons – whatever they are).

I plan on including the Lymann, Balmer, Paschen, Brackett and Pfund series of spectral lines. The user will be able to switch each line on/off in any combination. This will amount to over twenty tones.

The VST might be oscillator based and contain a certain amount of built in instability or granularity in the pitch to account for the slope up and down on each side of the spectral line.

It will not be a “keyboard style synth”. It will be an ambient sound-maker that may have tempo synch elements in it.

I am writing a program in Python to translate the wavelength of each spectral line into the neighborhood of the western twelve tone scale (27.50 – 4186.01 Hz). Using linear pitch space, the notes will be dropped into our chromatic scale according to the equation:

p = 69 + 12 * log2(f / 440)