If you know me or have been following my website for a while, you know that I have a fondness for synthesizers with the analog flavors being at the top of the list. Until recently, I never really thought about the exact reasons why I love them so much. Part of it has to do with the fact that I grew up listening to a lot of music involving them. I think that the biggest factor, though, dives deeper into the realm of pscychoacoustics and the nature of art in general.
I think it’s amazing how we as humans have the ability to take something very simple and change it into things that are more complex. A crayon is just a simple piece of colored wax but people are able to use them to create some very complicated pieces of art. Just do a search on Google and you can find thousands of them. I’m totally fascinated by this sort of thing.
Now the same can be applied to sound. You can start with a single basic waveform like a square wave or a triangle wave. Nothing in nature can produce pure bits of sound like this. It can only be done electronically with something like a synthesizer. By mixing different wave forms, modulating them and adding filters, they turn into something that can convey emotion just like a painting.
Here’s an example. I started out with a simple wave form that’s a mixer of a saw tooth wave and a triangle wave. While it’s not a ‘pure’ tone, it’s still fairly basic. There’s really no movement going on and it’s kind of boring. The image on the left is a screen shot of what this setting looks like on my Mopho synth.
With the next sample, I made some very tiny changes. If you click on the image to the left, you can see what I’ve changed. The Mopho can produce two tones at once and here I changed the tuning of each of those very slightly. I also added in a little bit of the low pass filter. These settings took me about 30 seconds or less to dial in but it’s quite noticeable when you listen to the sample below.
Analog Synthesizers are like playing with blocks except these blocks are made of sound. When it comes down to it, I’m still the same guy who loved to play with Lego’s as a kid. What happens when I put these two blocks together? What will it look like? I suppose the same goes with working my comic. I just really enjoy taking small things and combining them to make something big and cool. It never gets boring and my brain thinks it sounds awesome.
I’m still playing with Legos! Good thing I have a son or I would be the “weird” guy who still plays with Legos. Nice post about synthesizers… I can truly relate to growing up playing games that were based on all of these more primitive waveforms.
Speaking of older games, I have a couple projects in the wings where I’m going to be building some synthesizer modules using some IC chips from those days. Thomas Henry over at Birth of a Synth does some really nifty stuff with them.