The most widely used electronic instruments are synthesizers, so called because they generate sound artificially using techniques such as additive, subtractive, FM, and physical modeling synthesis to create sounds. Synthesizers are used for electronic music composition and live performance.
A brief history
The first electronic sound synthesizer, an instrument of impressive dimensions, was developed by American acoustic engineers Harry Olson and Herbert Belar in 1955 at the Radio Corporation of America laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey. The information was fed to the synthesizer encoded on a perforated paper tape. . It was designed for property research. Dr. Robert Moog introduced the first practical commercial modern music synthesizer with his Moog synthesizer. This instrument used a series of tone generators with keys that adjusted the pitch of the tone generators. The first digital synthesizers were academic experiments in sound synthesis using digital computers.
A brief discussion of the electronic sound synthesizer.
The word synthesis means to produce by combining separate elements. Therefore, the synthesized sound is the sound that a musician builds from component elements. A synthesized sound can resemble a traditional acoustic musical timbre, or it can be completely new and original. This feature is common to all synthesized music. Electronically generated music has spawned not only its own entirely separate musical field, but various sub-genres. An electronic music synthesizer is capable of creating sounds that are very different from any other instrument known to mankind. The creation and use of electronic synthesizers and related sound equipment involves considerable aspects of electrical engineering, physics, and mathematics. The use of synthesizers to create music is a field where all of these seemingly disparate branches of knowledge come together to produce what is possibly the most elegant fusion of art and science currently known to mankind.
Important Features of Electronic Sound Synthesizer
Some of the most important functions responsible for creating heavenly music from an electronic sound synthesizer are the oscillators, filters, envelope, amplifier, and equalizer.
Oscillators – An oscillator is simply a circuit that generates a repeating electrical wave, such as a sine wave, square wave, or sawtooth wave. The oscillator is sometimes called the VCO. An oscillator on a synthesizer usually allows you to vary the pitch, volume, and shape of the wave to make the pitch sound different.
Filters: A filter is a processing element that does something to a sound, usually by removing part of a sound. A synthesizer’s filter is sometimes called a VCF. You can remove sounds of a certain pitch or volume while allowing other sounds to pass through.
Envelope: The envelope generator is most commonly used to control the amplitude or volume of the sound, by routing it to the control input of the VCA. It’s even used to control the timbre of the sound, routing it to the VCF’s control input.
Amplifier: The amplifier can increase or decrease the height of the waveform, thereby increasing or decreasing the volume of the sound. To control the volume of a sound on the synthesizer, the signal passes through an amplifier circuit.
Equalizer: An equalizer is a tool that allows you to selectively amplify or attenuate certain sound frequency ranges.