Everything about Synthesizer totally explained
A
synthesizer is an
electronic instrument capable of producing a variety of sounds by generating and combining signals of different
frequencies. A modern digital synthesizer uses a
frequency synthesizer microprocessor component to calculate mathematical functions, which generate signals of different frequencies. There are three main types of synthesizers, which differ in operation:
analog,
digital and
software-based. Synthesizers create
electrical signals, rather than direct acoustic sounds, which are then amplified through a
loudspeaker or set of
headphones.
Synthesizers are typically controlled with a piano-style
keyboard, in which each key functions as a switch to turn
electronic circuits on and off. Although keyboards are the most common control interface, other devices such as saxophone-style
wind controllers, MIDI-equipped electric guitars, drum pads or
computers are used to control synthesizers. Synthesizers can produce a wide range of sounds, which can either imitate other instruments or generate unusual new timbres.
The first electric synthesizer was invented in 1876 by
Elisha Gray, who is best known for his
development of a telephone prototype.
Robert Moog created a revolutionary synthesizer which was used by Wendy Carlos's
Switched-On Bach (1968) a popular recording which introduced many musicians to the sound of synthesizers. In the 1970s, the development of miniaturized solid-state components allowed synthesizers to become self-contained, portable instruments, which made them easier to use in live performances. By the early 1980s, companies such as Yamaha began selling compact, modestly- priced synthesizers such as the DX7, and
MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) was developed, which made it easier to integrate and synchronize synthesizers with other electronic instruments.
Operation
A modern digital synthesizer uses a
frequency synthesizer microprocessor component to calculate mathematical functions, which generate signals of different frequencies. These frequencies are played through an output device such as a loudspeaker or set of headphones. In most conventional synthesizers, recordings of real instruments consist of several components. These sounds represent the acoustic responses of different parts of the instrument. These include the sounds produced by the instrument during different parts of a performance, or the behavior of the instrument under different playing conditions (changes in
pitch, intensity of playing, fingering). The distinctive
timbre,
intonation, and
attack of a real instrument can therefore be created by mixing these components in a way that resembles the natural behavior of the actual instrument. Nomenclature varies by synthesizer methodology and manufacturer, but the components are often referred to as
oscillators or
partials. A higher-fidelity reproduction of a natural instrument can be typically achieved using more oscillators, but increased computer power and human programming is required. Most synthesizers use between one and four oscillators by default.
The device used to trigger musical sounds in the synthesizer is called the controller.
Performers often play a synthesizer by depressing keys on a
musical keyboard; however, a number of other controllers are used, including saxophone-style
MIDI wind controllers and MIDI guitar synthesizer controllers. Most electronic keyboards use a
keyboard matrix circuit in which the rows and columns are made up of wiring. On electric and electronic keyboards, there's an electric switch under each key. Depressing a key connects a circuit, which causes the tone generation mechanism to be triggered.
Types of synthesis
There are three main types of synthesizers:
analog,
digital and
software. In addition, some synthesizers rely upon combinations of these three types and are known as
hybrid synthesizers.
Wavetable synthesis
Wavetable synthesis uses a
digital recording of an existing sound. These are known as samples, replayed at a range of pitches. Sample playback replaces the
oscillator circuit found in other synthesizers. Most
music workstations process sounds using effects such as filters,
low-frequency oscillation, and
ring modulators. Sample playback commonly replays samples at a faster speed, instead of changing the pitch. For example, to alter the frequency of a sound one
octave higher, it's played at double speed; inversely, to shift the frequency of the sound one octave lower, it's played at half-speed. Instruments dedicated to recording and playing samples are known as
samplers.
Due to the nature of digital sound storage,
anti-aliasing and
interpolation techniques are used to achieve a natural-sounding waveform. This is especially important if more than one note is played, or if arbitrary tone intervals are used. The calculations on sample-data must be very precise (for high quality, around 64 bits), especially if various parameters are needed to create a specific sound. If too many parameters are used, excessive calculations need to be made to avoid the rounding errors of the multiple calculations taking place.
Wavetable synthesis is used in certain digital music synthesizers to implement real-time
additive synthesis and
direct digital synthesis with minimum hardware. The technique was first developed by
Wolfgang Palm in 1978, and has since been used in other synthesizers built by
Yamaha,
Korg and Waldorf Instruments. It is commonly used in low-end
MIDI instruments such as educational keyboards, and low-end
sound cards.
In the 1950s,
RCA produced experimental devices to synthesize both voice and music. The
Mark II Music Synthesizer, housed at the
Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in
New York City in 1958, was only capable of producing music once it had been completely programmed. This was used for a number of years at the BBC.
Hugh Le Caine, John Hanert,
Raymond Scott, the composer
Percy Grainger (with Burnett Cross), and others built a variety of automated electronic-music controllers during the late 1940s and 1950s.
By the 1960s, synthesizers were developed that could be played in real time but were confined to studios because of their size. These synthesizers were usually configured using a modular design, with standalone signal sources and processors being connected with patch cords or by other means, and all controlled by a common controlling device.
Some early analog synthesizers were monophonic, producing only one tone at a time. A few, such as the Moog Sonic Six,
ARP Odyssey and EML 101, were capable of producing two different pitches at a time when two keys were pressed.
Polyphony (multiple simultaneous tones, which enables
chords), was only obtainable with electronic organ designs at first. Popular electronic keyboards combining organ circuits with synthesizer processing included the ARP Omni and Moog's Polymoog and Opus 3. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, DIY (Do it yourself) designs were published in hobby electronics magazines (notably the Formant modular synth, a
DIY clone of the Moog system, published by
Elektor) and kits were supplied by companies such as Paia in the US, and Maplin Electronics in the UK.
Modular synthesizers
Most early synthesizers were experimental modular designs.
Don Buchla,
Hugh Le Caine,
Raymond Scott and
Paul Ketoff were among the first to build such instruments, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Buchla later produced a commercial modular synthesizer, the
Buchla Music Easel.
Robert Moog, who had been a student of
Peter Mauzey and one of the RCA Mark II engineers, created a revolutionary synthesizer that could be used by musicians. Moog designed the circuits used in his synthesizer while he was at Columbia-Princeton. The
Moog synthesizer was first displayed at the
Audio Engineering Society convention in 1964. Like the RCA Mark II, it required more experience to set up new sounds, but it was smaller and more intuitive than what had come before. Less like a machine and more like a musical instrument, the Moog synthesizer was at first a curiosity, but by 1968 had caused a sensation.
Moog also established standards for control interfacing, with a logarithmic 1-volt-per-octave pitch control and a separate pulse triggering signal. This standardization allowed synthesizers from different manufacturers to operate simultaneously. Pitch control is usually performed either with an organ-style keyboard or a
music sequencer, which produces a series of control voltages over a fixed time period and allows some automation of music production. Other early commercial synthesizer manufacturers included
ARP, who also started with modular synthesizers before producing all-in-one instruments, and British firm
EMS.
Micky Dolenz of
The Monkees bought one of the first three Moog synthesizers and the first commercial release to feature a Moog synthesizer was
The Monkees' fourth album,
Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., in 1967, which also became the first album featuring a synthesizer to hit #1 on the charts. During the late 1960s, hundreds of other popular recordings used Moog synthesizer sounds. The Moog synthesizer even spawned a subculture of record producers who made novelty "Moog" recordings, depending on the odd new sounds made by their synthesizers (which were not always Moog units) to draw attention and sales.
Popular synthesizers
In 1970, Moog designed an innovative synthesizer with a built-in keyboard and without modular design - the analog circuits were retained, but made interconnectable with switches in a simplified arrangement called "normalization". Though less flexible than a modular design, normalization made the instrument more portable and easier to use. This first pre-patched synthesizer, the
Minimoog, became highly popular, with over 12,000 units sold. The
Minimoog also influenced the design of nearly all subsequent synthesizers, with integrated keyboard, pitch wheel and modulation wheel, and a VCO->VCF->VCA signal flow.
In the 1970s miniaturized solid-state components allowed synthesizers to become self-contained, portable instruments, which soon began to be used in live performances. Electronic synthesizers had quickly become a standard part of the popular-music repertoire. The first movie to make use of synthesized music was the
James Bond film
On Her Majesty's Secret Service in 1969. After the release of the film, a large number of movies were made with synthesized music. A few of them, such as 1982's
John Carpenter's "The Thing", used only synthesized music in their scores.
Modern synthesizers
By 1976, the first true music synthesizers to offer polyphony had begun to appear, most notably in the form of the
Yamaha GX1, CS-50, CS-60 and
Yamaha CS-80 and the Oberheim Four-Voice. These early instruments were very complex, heavy, and costly. Another feature that began to appear was the recording of knob settings in a digital memory, allowing the changing of sounds quickly. When microprocessors first appeared on the scene in the early 1970s, they were expensive and difficult to apply.
The first practical polyphonic synth, and the first to use a microprocessor as a controller, was the
Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 introduced in 1978. For the first time, musicians had a practical polyphonic synthesizer that allowed all knob settings to be saved in computer memory and recalled by pushing a button. The Prophet-5 was also physically compact and lightweight, unlike its predecessors. This basic design paradigm became a standard among synthesizer manufacturers, slowly pushing out the more complex and recondite modular design. One of the first real-time polyphonic digital music synthesizers was the
Coupland Digital Music Synthesizer. It was much more portable than a piano but never reached commercial production.
The
Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument) was the first polyphonic digital
sampling synthesizer. It was designed in 1978 by the founders of
Fairlight, Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, and based on a dual
microprocessor computer designed by Tony Furse in Sydney, Australia. The Fairlight CMI gave musicians the ability to modify volume, attack, decay, and special effects like vibrato.
Waveforms could also be modified on a
computer monitor using a
light pen. It rose to prominence in the early 1980s and competed in the market with the
Synclavier from
New England Digital. The first buyers of the new system were
Herbie Hancock,
Peter Gabriel,
Richard James Burgess,
Todd Rundgren,
Nick Rhodes of
Duran Duran, producer
Rhett Lawrence,
Stevie Wonder and Ned "EBN" Liben of
Ebn Ozn, who acted as Fairlight's New York expert liaison to the American musician community.
The
Kurzweil K250, first produced in 1983, was also a successful polyphonic digital music synthesizer. It was noted for its ability to reproduce several instruments synchronously; the Kurzweil K250 also had a velocity-sensitive keyboard. It was priced at
US$ 10,000.
Since the early 1980s, most new synthesizers have been digital. Japanese manufacturers Yamaha and Casio both played a large part as manufacturers of digital synthesizers during the 1980s and 1990s.
John Chowning, a professor at
Stanford University, exclusively licensed his patent covering
FM synthesis to Yamaha in 1975. Yamaha subsequently released their first FM synthesizers, the
GS-1 and
GS-2, both of which were costly and heavy. Yamaha soon followed with the GS series, which used a pair of smaller, preset versions - the CE20 and CE25 Combo Ensembles. These were targeted primarily at the home organ market and featured four-octave keyboards. Yamaha's third generation of digital synthesizers became their most popular. These consisted of the
DX7 and
DX9 (1983). Both models were compact, reasonably priced, and dependant on custom digital integrated circuits to produce FM tonalities. The DX7 became indispensable to many music artists of the 1980s, and demand soon exceeded supply. The DX7 sold over 200,000 units within three years.
After the introduction of the DX series, Bo Tomlyn, original DX7 project manager Mike Malizola, and Chuck Monte founded Key Clique, Inc, which sold thousands of
ROM cartridges with new FM/DX7 sounds to DX7 owners. This led to the demise of the heavy, electro-mechanical
Rhodes piano during the 1980s, until its comeback in the 1990s. Yamaha later licensed its FM technology to other manufacturers. By the time the Stanford patent expired, almost every
personal computer in the world contained an audio input-output system with a built-in 4-operator FM digital synthesizer.
Following the success of Yamaha's licensing of Stanford's FM synthesis patent, Yamaha signed a contract with Stanford University in 1989 to develop jointly
digital waveguide synthesis. As such, most patents related to the technology are owned by Stanford or Yamaha. The first commercial physical modeling synthesizer was Yamaha's
VL-1 in 1994. Analog synthesizers have also revived in popularity since the 1980s. In recent years, the two trends have sometimes been combined as
analog modeling synthesizers, or digital synthesizers that model analog synthesis using digital signal processing techniques. New analog instruments now also accompany the large number from the digital world.
MIDI control
Synthesizers became easier to integrate and synchronize with other electronic instruments and controllers with the introduction in 1983 of
MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface). First proposed in 1981 by
Dave Smith of
Sequential Circuits, the MIDI standard was developed by a consortium now known as the MIDI Manufacturers Association. MIDI is an
opto-isolated serial interface and
communication protocol. It provides for the transmission from one device or instrument to another of real-time performance data. This data includes note events, commands for the selection of instrument presets (for example sounds, or programs or patches, previously stored in the instrument's memory), the control of performance-related parameters such as volume, effects levels and the like, as well as synchronization, transport control and other types of data. MIDI interfaces are now almost ubiquitous on music equipment and are commonly available on
personal computers (PCs).
The
General MIDI (GM)
software standard was devised in 1991 to serve as a consistent way of describing a set of over 200 tones (including percussion) available to a PC for playback of musical scores. For the first time, a given MIDI preset would consistently produce an instrumental sound on any GM-conforming device. The
Standard MIDI File (SMF) format (
extension .mid) combined MIDI events with delta times - a form of time-stamping - and became a popular standard for exchange of music scores between computers. In the case of SMF playback using integrated synthesizers (as in computers and cell phones), the hardware component of the MIDI interface design is often unneeded.
OSC, OpenSound Control, is a proposed replacement for MIDI which was designed for networking. In contrast with MIDI, OSC is fast enough to allow thousands of synthesizers or computers to share music performance data over the internet in
realtime.
Impact on the music industry and culture
The synthesizer has had a large impact on modern music over the past forty years. The most significant influence of the instrument came during the 1970s and 1980s. Wendy Carlos's
Switched-On Bach (1968), recorded using
Moog synthesizers, influenced numerous musicians of that era.
Switched-On Bach is one of the most popular classical music recordings ever made, and the first to go
Platinum. During the late 1960s, hundreds of other popular recordings used Moog synthesizers. The Moog synthesizer even spawned a subculture of record producers who made novelty "Moog" recordings, depending on the odd new sounds made by their synthesizers (which were not always Moog units) to draw attention and sales.
The synthesizer's notable influence during the late 1970s and 1980s lead to mainstream popularity amongst renowned music artists. Among the first major artists to fully use the synthesizer were
Wendy Carlos, Numan continued to use synthesizers throughout most of his career, including the 1980 hit
Cars.
The influences of synthesizers on the
New Romantic movement in the United Kingdom during the 1980s were evident from its usage by
Nick Rhodes, keyboardist of
Duran Duran. At the time, the band used the
Roland Jupiter-4 and
Jupiter-8 synthesizers. The emergence of
Synthpop, a subgenre of
New Wave, can be largely credited to the synthesizer. It lasted from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s. The influences of synthesizer technology and Germanic ambience of Kraftwerk and of David Bowie during his Berlin period (1976-77) were both crucial in the development of the synthpop genre. By 1981, many artists had adopted the synthpop sound and experienced chart success, such as Depeche Mode, Visage,
OMD and Ultravox. Other chart hits include
Depeche Mode's
Just Can't Get Enough (1981), Typically, the sounds varied between artists and songs, but all were distinctively produced using synthesizers.
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