Help needed: How do the Cicada, Lunacy (and other FX/Chord) Wavetables work?

In regular wavetable synthesis, the way I understood it you can have complex wavetables, but you don't get "movement" without modulation. However when I load Lunacy in old Massive, or Cicada in either old/new Massive X, I can hear movement, sound you'd normally get with LFO modulation. Does this mean that the wavetable synthesis in both Massive and Massive X is fundamentally different than in most of other synths (Serum, Phase Plant, Pigments etc.)? How is Massive/Massive X achieving this, how is their wavetable synthesis different from others?

 

It's nothing fundamentally out of the ordinary, but having snooped around OG Massive's wavetable data a little (grain of salt as I'm away from my computer, and it's been a while...), I noticed that Massive does not use a fixed number of frames per table, nor a fixed size thereof (although I'm pretty sure each is 2^n samples long, and is consistent per table), and there's some header information that tells Massive, e.g., "this table has 70 frames of 1024 samples each, playback should be transposed an octave down to sound at pitch" and so on. I recall that some of them including the ones you named contain only a small number of frames, but each frame is preposterously long and pitched way, way, way down to accommodate, so they can pack in a heck of a lot more information than you'd normally hear in a single brief cycle. I'm sure that accounts for all the oddball stuff you're hearing.

 

Interesting, so there is something to it. Thanks for the insight