One eventful night in the autumn of 1967, he discovered that modulating one computer-generated waveform with another at high frequency rates (much faster than traditional LFO-based vibrato) produced a timbral shift. Since the mid-1960s, composer and electronic musician John Chowning had been experimenting with ways to shift sound around in a 3-dimensional space. The following year, Sequential offered a novel approach to manipulating single-cycle waveforms with the Prophet VS, which used a joystick or other modulators (such as forward/backward looping envelopes) to cross-fade between four waveforms at a time.Ĭlearly, progress was being made in refining digital synthesis … but it was a different technology altogether that would cause a cataclysmic shift in the industry. company Ensoniq released a wavetable synthesizer called the ESQ-1, which used static waveforms and an analog filter to produce a distinctive tonality. This digital technology used groups of single-cycle waveforms stored in a lookup table, which could be played back, or swept through in real time for a very signature sound. German musician and inventor Wolfgang Palm’s pioneering work in wavetable synthesis saw fruition with the release of the PPG Wave in 1981. At around the same time, the Italian company Crumar released the GDS Digital Synthesizer, building on work done by designer Hal Alles at Bell Labs, followed two years later by the Synergy, an additive synth that was favored by composer Wendy Carlos for decades. The dawn of the 1980s saw the release of the second-generation New England Digital Synclavier II, which added a simple FM structure (see below) and a 32-track sequencer, making it a full-blown production workstation … albeit a very expensive one. Here in Part 2, we’ll explore their more recent forebears and describe several key technologies that lie at the heart of today’s synths. Over the last half-century, the focus has instead been almost entirely on digital synthesis, where sounds are created from mathematical representations of audio waveforms in essence, modern-day synthesizers are highly specialized computers. Those early synths were almost entirely of the analog variety - that is, they created sounds with the use of electronic components such as vacuum tubes and transistors. In Part 1 of this two-part series, we explored the origins of audio synthesis.
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