New approaches to analog music synthesis

Abstract

Analog, voltage-controlled electronic music synthesizers have been developed over a period of about ten years into a fairly standard commercial product. While these synthesizers are unquestionably useful for certain types of music, they are also limited in many ways. A number of fairly simple “new modules” involving conventional circuitry and conventional electronic components can be developed and added to the conventional set of synthesizer modules. New types of excitation sources for driving processing type modules are also possible. Beyond these, new developments in electronics make possible entirely new synthesis devices and suggest new approaches to older unsolved problems. As one example, digital control of analog synthesis based on a microprocessor approach makes it possible to realize musical structures and developments of a greater complexity than is possible with manual control alone. As a second example, charge-transfer analog shift registers provide, analog delay in a compact and inexpensive form, thus making possible new approaches to special musical effects, reverberation, and pitch extraction, to name a few.