What interesting audio can be synthesized with ifft I'm working on a presentation on audio synthesis for some fellow software engineers. I want to include some "fourier synthesis" creating time domain samples from frequency domain samples using ifft.

Does anyone know of interesting sounds that can be easily synthesized with ifft?  I can do (bandlimited) square, saw, and triangle waves already, but i'm thinking more along the lines of voice or stringed instruments or something.  Does anyone know of anything that would be a simple to understand but interesting demo for fourier synthesis?

Thanks!
You can take a look at Photosounder. The idea behind is simple: Take an image as if it were an spectrogram and compute its IFFT, the result is  always interesting at least! It tends to work better with abstract images and geometric shapes, a great example is the video on the upper-right corner, "The sound of fractals".

I would never try to replicate a real instrument using this method, but you can encourage your fellows to try it as a challenge...