i am looking for a sound tutorial that teaches how to make a sound just by taking a sine wave and manipulating it but cannot find anything. the sound program i am using is called audacity. i am a beginner to audio and would have to read a simple tutorial for beginners.

Ummm... You're not really gunna get anywhere by doing that, I don't think; I'm not a sound expert. Even if it's remotely possible it would be EXTREMELEY (I mean VERY VERY EXTREMLEY) tedious. Now that I think about I doubt it's possible, much less with Audacity, its more for converting files and manipluating them somewhat and has some nice filters.

What sound are you talking about? Are you talking about sound effects? If so try Googling free sound effects sites (some regulars of this board will prolly have a good link for one).

If you want music, try ModPlug Tracker at http://www.modplug.com. It's very nice for a free program. If you're looking to spend money on custom music then do something liek Cakewalk or FLStudio. If you don't want to create custom music look for free music sites on Google; like I said earlier, I'm pretty sure the regulars have nice links for this too.

Good luck! :)

Wow, I'm impressed. I'm sure it can be done, but that's almost crazy. Not sure I see the advantages of going from a total sine wav and working it, but I could see the advanced user working with the waves he has (I mean, you can zoom in to that extent with programs, but I don't know about editing it). All this goes doubly so for a free program.

I'll look around some and see what can be done with different software regarding manipulating waves.

Okay. I'm surprised - I checked out a ton of different (free) programs, but none of them had anything useful. Then I checked out GoldWave on a whim (they have a new release), and lo and behold, they have some options, if not exactly what you're looking for.

Quote: GoldWave:
The Expression Evaluator allows sound to be generated from almost any equation. For example, to generate a simple sine wave, the following can be entered:

sin(2*pi*f*t)

General expressions for sine, triangle, and square waves are already provided, plus expressions for dial tones, effects, and noises.

From the site: http://www.goldwave.com/features.php.

If you're looking to edit waves, I imagine you understand (at least to an extent?) the mathematics behind them (which I don't). This ought to help with that. I'm going to guess that you can do even more that isn't shown on their features page, but you'll have to try it out for yourself.

Ah - and you can download the SDK (software development kit - C++) to write your own plug-ins and perhaps add more functionality to get the results you want.

Good luck!

In theory it may be possible... But I mean editing a sine wave for a sound effect?... It would take so long and be so tedious to get it correct for the hundreds (well, maybe not hundreds for smaller puzzle like games but when you get to bigger projects it will be hundreds or even thosands) of sound effects to put in your game simply isn't feasible, much less practical.

You'd be much better off recording you're own or getting free sounds from the net and editing if neccessary.

Er, FM synthesis anyone?

You can achieve all sorts of nifty effects by feeding sine waves (or various other simple synth' waveforms) through a vocoder. Of course, you'll still need some sort of a vocal recording to provide the prevocal formants, but you'd be surprised what you can come up with through some creative knob twisting.

FM synthesis? You mean additive synthesis. Additive synthesis is a form of synthesis based on the theory that all sound can be broken down into simpler and simpler waveforms, thus, you can recreate anything using sine waves alone. There are plenty of additive synthesizers out there, my favorite software one being "Motion" (find it at kvr-vst.com). So, yes, it's easily possible.

FM synthesis would simply be using one oscillator to modulate the frequency of another oscillator. The two oscillators could be any waveform, or even no waveform (noise).