Express Yourself With Authentic Expression Technology

When sampling acoustic instruments, it’s difficult to get them to sound realistic because they change their tonal characteristics throughout their range of dynamic and expression. Kontakt has a feature called Authentic Expression Technology or AET, that uses an FFT filter that allows you to morph between two samples in real-time. This video tutorial takes a quick look at Authentic Expression Technology.

When sampling acoustic instruments, it’s difficult to get them to sound realistic because they change their tonal characteristics throughout their range of dynamic and expression. This makes it difficult to capture the whole range of their sonic character in a convincing way. One approach to get around this is to use more velocity layers per note. While this increases the Instrument’s detail, the timbre changes when moving from one velocity layer to the next, are still there.

With Authentic Expression Technology (AET), an FFT filter with a very high resolution is used to ‘imprint’ frequency responses on your signal. These frequency responses are derived from other samples in your patch via spectral analysis.

For instance one velocity layer could be filtered with the spectral information from the layer above, to sonically shift them closer. And by dynamically varying the amount of processing via modulation (such as velocity), you can pass through multiple intermediate stages between the two samples and morph them in real-time. You can also morph between different articulations or even between different signals.

Until next time…now go make some music.