… 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).

... the Triangulum Galaxy - a large region of ionized hydrogen ...

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 most common spectral lines of hydrogen ...

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.

... the lines are not perfectly thin (Balmer series) ...

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)