Fuzzy Logic Control Toolkit 2.0: composing and synthesis by fuzzyfication

In computer or electroacoustic music, it is often the case that the compositional act and the parametric control of the underlying synthesis algorithms or hardware are not separable from each other. In these situations, composition and control of the synthesis parameters are not easy to distinguish. One possible solution is by means of fuzzy logic. This approach provides a simple, intuitive but powerful control of the compositional process usually in interesting non-linear ways. Compositional control in this context is achieved by the fuzzification of the relevant internal synthesis parameters and the parallel computation of common sense fuzzy rules of inference specified by the composer. This approach has been implemented computationally as a software package entitled FLCTK (Fuzzy Logic Control Tool Kit) in the form of external objects for the widely used real-time compositional environments Max/MSP and Pd. In this article, we present an updated version of this tool. As a demonstration of the wide range of situations in which this approach could be used, we provide two examples of parametric fuzzy control: first, the fuzzy control of a water tank simulation and second a particle-based sound synthesis technique by a fuzzy approach.