Another series of Theremins devices resembled the cello, except that no strings were involved. On one of these, the performer moved fingers up and down a touchplate surfacea fingerboardto play one note at a time.
The other hand rested on a lever that jutted out of the fingerboard Theremin to control note articulation and volume. Three examplesto the rightof the fingerboard instruments Leon Theremin developed during the s. On the left is an incomplete instrument. Courtesy of Tom Rhea In early , I painted and assembled this Etherwave Theremin, a kit from Big BriarBob Moogs company name before he recovered the legal rights to his name in Moog Music still offers the Etherwave in assembled and kit forms.
Mark Vail For The Birds The German acoustician Friedrich Trautwein introduced another innovative and expressive monophonic electronic instrument in , the Trautonium.
For pitch control, it incorporated a metal bar onto which the performer depressed a wire that closed a circuit and generated a tone. Protrusions extending above the bar indicated specific notes, but the pitch varied continuously.
While earlier versions of his instrument produced every note with the same abrupt attack, Trautwein later equipped the instrument with a mechanism that allowed the performer to vary note attack by changing how hard or soft he depressed the wire onto the bar. Given enough practice, a performer could play the Trautonium very expressively.
Unlike the Theremin, the Trautonium incorporated a neon-tube oscillator to produce a rich- sounding sawtooth waveform replete with high harmonics, which could be filtered for timbral variation. Trautwein understood the nature of formants in acoustic instruments and equipped the Trautonium with a series of formant filters, or resonators, which the performer could tune over extended frequency ranges in real time, thus allowing a wide variety of tonal variations.
This illustrates an important contrast between electronic and acoustic instruments: the physical attributes of an acoustic instrumentincluding the shape of its body and resonance propertiesforce its formant to be fixed to a specific frequency range.
A young Oskar Sala performs in concert on a Telefunken Trautonium. Courtesy of Tom Rhea sawtooth: a waveform with a voltage that begins at a low value, climbs steadily to a high value, then drops immediately to the beginning value before repeating the shape; a reverse sawtooth does the opposite, jumping immediately from low to high, falling steadily to the low point, and so on waveform: a signal generated by an oscillator with certain harmonic content harmonics: overtones, or higher frequencies, in a tone that are integer multiples of the fundamental fundamental: the root or lowest frequency of a note, typically perceived as its pitch formant: one or more frequencies that are emphasized by the resonant qualities of an acoustic instruments body or by filters in an electronic instrument In the early s, Trautweins colleague Paul Hindemith composed music such as Trio Pieces for Three Trautonia and Concerto for Solo Trautonium and Orchestra.
Telefunken produced a limited run of Trautoniums beginning in Alfred Hitchcocks The Birds featured sounds produced by the instruments descendant, the Mixtur Trautonium, to which the virtuoso Oskar Sala made extensive enhancements. Oskar Sala plays the Mixtur Trautonium in Sala made many contributions to this instrument beyond Friedrich Trautweins original Trautonium.
Courtesy of Tom Rhea Waggling Keyboard Its a bit of a stretch to fathom, but a monophonic keyboard, developed to enhance pianos and organs in the mid-twentieth-century home, offers more expressive control than many contemporary synthesizers.
The thirty-seven-note keyboard for Georges Jennys Ondiolinewhich he began developing in , patented in , and produced until mounts underneath a piano or organ keybed. Its keys are similar to those on an accordion, but the keyboard is spring-loaded to allow finger-generated vibrato with horizontal motions. The Ondiolines keyboard also responds to pressure: After youve played a note, you can vary its volume and timbre by changing how hard you depress the key.
You can transpose the Ondioline to cover an eight-octave range. Its separate speaker cabinet contains most of the electronicsall vacuum tubes originally, but solid-state transistor circuits appear in later models. Using switches at the top of the speaker cabinet, you can vary timbre by routing the audio signal through a variety of filter paths.
Dana Countryman, Dana Countryman vibrato: a hopefully pleasant and periodic wavering or modulation of pitch produced manually or using automation, typically modulated in a synthesizer with a sine or triangle waveform oscillating at around 7Hz sine waveform: a periodic, single-frequency, sinusoidal waveform; at audible frequencies, it consists only the fundamental frequency and no harmonics and is also known as a pure tone triangle waveform: named for its triangular shape, a periodic signal that rises and falls in a linear fashion with sharp corners at the waveforms apex and lowest point; useful as an LFO low-frequency oscillator waveform for pitch modulation as a vibrato effect; at audible frequencies, a triangle wave contains the fundamental frequency and all of the odd- numbered harmonics whose ascending amplitudes decrease in ratios of , , , , , etc.
He left medical school to work with Jenny d. Perrey proved that the Ondioline can produce unique and diverse timbres, and that the expression it affords can equal that of a violin. Timbral Flowage Borrowing the medieval moniker for what became the trombonethe sackbutthe Canadian Hugh Le Caine created an extremely expressive instrument with components and capabilities found on voltage-controlled synthesizers that it preceded by decades.
Le Caines monophonic Electronic Sackbut, which he developed between and and continued to redesign and improve until , had a familiar-looking musical keyboard for note selection, but one that was quite unusual. For one thing, it was horizontally spring-loaded. Lateral movements to a key altered the pitch, allowing a gradual bend up or down to a different noteeven one between the cracks of a scale.
Wobbling a key back and forth imparted vibrato to the pitch. Not only was the bend range adjustable up to a whole octave, but pitch could also be controlled via a touch-sensitive ribbon. The Electronic Sackbuts four-octave keyboard also provided velocity response for variations in note attack: playing softly resulted in a note with a slow entrance, and hitting a key harder made the response more immediate.
Continuous pressure sensing allowed real-time variation in note volume for producing crescendos and diminuendos after a note began playing. Hugh Le Caine with a prototype of his Electronic Sackbut in Courtesy of Gustav Ciamaga, the Institute of Radio Engineers, and the Electronic Music Foundation To address timbre, Le Caine equipped the Electronic Sackbut with a lefthand control section for precise parameter manipulation using fingertip pressure.
The performers left index finger varied among basic waveforms, some of which were evocative replications of clarinet, flute, oboe, trumpet, and organ. Other waveforms stressed the fundamental or certain harmonic intervals. As a note sounded, the player could morph through different timbres. In addition, the left thumb and remaining fingers shaped the Electronic Sackbuts tone: while the performer used his or her thumb to control filter resonance and the formant, or peak in the frequency spectrum, he or she could modulate amplitude and frequency and add noise or periodic voltages using other fingers.
Continuous variation of the harmonic content of the Electronic Sackbuts tone made the instrument much more expressive than it otherwise would have been. Unfortunately, it never went into production due to Le Caines inability to finalize its design. Creating a few minutes of taped music could take weeks or even months. Some of the earliest efforts to replace musique concrte techniques with musical voltage- controlled instruments took place at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, co-founded by Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender in the early s.
They engaged Don Buchla to begin designing electronic music devices in early , drawing on his knowledge of physics and electronics, as well as his experience in building acoustic and electro-acoustic instruments of welded steel and other materials. Buchlas approach to designing instruments has always been scientific, organic, and user- oriented.
One characteristic that distinguishes most of his instruments from competitors is the absence of an organ-style keyboard. Instead, he prefers capacitance- or resistance-sensitive touchplates organized in various arrangements.
The touchplates are area-sensitive, with each plate transmitting three control voltages depending on finger position and the amount of force exerted, which increases or decreases the amount of skin coming into contact with the touchplate. Alternative Controllers In case an organ-style keyboard, or any of its equivalents, isnt your first choice to play a synthesizer, you have many other options. While Don Buchla has contributed his fair share of alternative controllers, he isnt alone in their development.
There are, for instance, wind controllers from sources including Nyle Steiner, Softwind Instruments, Eigenlabs, and Akai; percussion pads and instruments such as those from Alternate Mode Kat, Korg, and Alesis; complete electronic drum systems from Roland, Yamaha, and others; ribbons from Doepfer, Kurzweil, and Eowave; and a huge variety of unique controllers and electronic instruments. In addition, for those whod rather do it themselves, manufacturers such as Electrotap, I-Cube, and Eowave offer sensors for tracking changes in acceleration, temperature, distance, light, pressure, and other physical actions, as well as interfaces for connecting these sensors to synths and computers to control specific aspects and parameters.
See ch. This instrument has resided in the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College since the late s. Bill Reitzel Buchla also developed some of the earliest analog sequencers. His first synth had three of them, two with eight stages or steps apiece, the third with sixteen. Each stage generated three voltage- control outputs.
You could synchronize two sequencers to get six voltages per stage, and you could create complex rhythm patterns by setting the sequencers to different numbers of stagesfor example, five stages against thirteen.
Over the years Don Buchla has created numerous series of modular synthesizers and custom instruments, including the original Series Electric Music Box and ca. Control has always played an important role in Dons instruments.
Rick Smith completely refurbished this Buchla Series Electric Music Box system, for which he began collecting modules in February and finished in He succeeded in his goal of making it classic, Series era-correct with components from to Rick Smith, Buchla Restorations, www. Among those touring and giving live concerts with a e modular is Morton Subotnick, who played a key part in getting Buchla to design synthesizer modules in the first place. During the late s and early 90s, Buchla shifted his focus almost exclusively to alternative controllers, developing the Thunder pad and Lightning wireless controllers.
They were followed in by the Buchla-designed Piano Bar, a retrofit that converts any acoustic piano into a complex MIDI controller and synthesizer. Robert A. Moog rhymes with rogue made many groundbreaking contributions to the electronic-music industry, especially in terms of control and sound quality. He began building and selling Theremins in Deutsch in to design and construct a modular synthesizer, which he demonstrated at the Audio Engineering Society AES convention in October He introduced the first Moog Modular synthesizers in Released by Columbia Records in November , Switched-On Bach became the first album of classical music to go platinumeventually selling millions of copiesand put Moogs name and instruments on the map.
Carlos and Deutsch were among numerous composers who influenced Bob in designing new synth modules. Besides assisting Bob on technical issues, modifications, and improvements, Wendy helped Moog add touch-sensitivity to the synthesizers keyboard, which had previously responded like an organ or harpsichord: all notes played the same no matter how hard keys were struck.
Bob also modified two fixed-filter banks as encoder and decoder filters for her custom vocoder. Out in front is a Moog Percussion Controller. With the permission of Ileana Grams-Moog Another contributor was Vladmir Ussachevsky, who provided specifications for an envelope follower and envelope generator, and it was Gustav Ciamaga of the University of Toronto whose module description led to Bobs first voltage-controlled low-pass filter.
Its signal-routing structureoscillator, noise, and external input signals go into a mixer, which passes the aggregate signal through the envelope-controlled lowpass filter and amplifier before reaching the main outputs became a standard in the synth industry. The Minimoog proved so popular, thanks in good part to Keith Emerson, Jan Hammer, Chick Corea, Rick Wakeman, and many others who played it onstage and in studios, that Moog Music made more than 12, of them from to , making it the most popular American-made monophonic analog synthesizer of the twentieth century.
A shot of the Moog studio in Trumansburg, New York, where Moog instruments were manufactured between and Note the conveniently placed patch cord tree directly to the left of the big Moog Modular. With the permission of Ileana Grams-Moog After reluctantly leaving Moog Music in and subsequently losing the legal right to put his own name on musical instruments, Bob Moog founded Big Briar in and continued to develop new Theremins and other products.
He finally reclaimed the legal right to his name in It began shipping in A variety of models are available, including the Old Schoolwhich like the original Minimoog lacks MIDI and patch memory for synthesists who want to work the old-fashioned wayand Minimoog Voyager XL, featuring a sixty-one-note keyboard that responds to velocity and aftertouch and a front-panel patchbay for extended signal-routing flexibility.
Throughout the years, Bob Moogs companies have produced Theremins. The occasion was a two-day conference called The Keyboard Meets Modern Technology, a series of programs specifically honoring synthesizers during the Smithsonians Piano Celebrating Three Centuries of People and Pianos. Mark Vail aftertouch: the varying amount of downward force or pressure applied to a key after it has been struck and reaches the bottom of its travel patchbay: a panel or rackmount unit containing multiple jacks that are interconnected to allow flexible patching and rerouting of signals rackmount: a device with permanent or removable earsvertical, perpendicular extensions on either side of its front panelperforated with two or more holes and measuring 19 inches across, allowing the device to be mounted in industrial-standard 19 racks; the letter U identifies the devices height, 1U indicating a single-space rackmount unit, with 1U being equal to 1.
They finally completed it as a MIDI controller in Each of its forty-nine keys can sense finger position, how much skin is touching the key surface, how far down the key is pressed, and how hard the key is depressed at the bottom of its travel, so the instrument can transmit polyphonic aftertouch.
When he began working with the finished Eaton-Moog keyboard, Eaton discovered it generated more MIDI controller data than he could find interesting parameters to control on synthesizers of the early s. However, he returned to working with it in late and discovered the situation had much improved with contemporary software instruments. An electronic instrument called the Syn-Ket from the early s, when electronic music and various arts thrived at the American Academy in Rome, Italy.
Smith, and George Balch Wilson. A talented sound engineer named Paul Ketoff had constructed a large, studio-confined instrument called the Phonosynth with the composer Gino Marinuzzi. After Ketoff demonstrated it for the Americans, they persuaded him to make a smaller, less elaborate version. Thus was born in the Syn-Ket, the Synthesizer Ketoff. From the top down are modulation generators; a nine-band fixed filter bank; a patchbay matrix; three voice channels; a module containing a white-noise generator, spring reverb, and VU meter; and three twenty- four-note keyboards.
Courtesy of John Eaton Following completion of the original, Eaton recommended numerous musical features that Ketoff added to subsequent models. In essence, the Syn-Ket contained three synthesizers. It had three cascading twenty-four-note keyboards like the manuals of an organ console. The keys were small, like those on a toy piano, but you could wiggle them back and forth to bend notes and produce vibrato. On the second Syn-Ket, made specifically for Eaton, the keys also responded to velocity for control of amplitude and the filters.
Each keyboard controlled its own voice, or sound-combiner as Ketoff referred to them, consisting of a square-wave oscillator; a series of button-controlled frequency dividers capable of dividing the incoming frequency by factors of 2, 3, 4, 5, and 8 to produce different harmonics; three complex filters; an amplifier; and three independent modulators.
Vacuum-tube and solid-state circuitry made up the sound-combiners, which you could interconnect for a wider range of timbral possibilities.
Eaton felt the Syn-Ket offered a human nuance missing from other early electronic instruments, and he enjoyed the ability to perform counterpoint parts with it alone. Ketoff hand-made about a dozen Syn-Kets between and , and there were considerable differences among them.
Designed for live performance, the Syn-Ket proved challenging and difficult to learnmuch like an acoustic instrumentbut very rewarding given enough effort.
Eaton, a renowned opera composer who frequently combined synths with orchestra and voice, wrote many pieces for Syn-Ket and toured extensively with one or two of these instruments between and Over time the aging instruments began to malfunction and eventually failed entirely. Armand Pascettas Pratt-Reed Polyphony As synthesizers became more prevalent during the early s, many players lamented their monophonic nature. Doing business as Electro Group, Pascetta wired Pratt-Reed keyboards to a unique processor before microprocessors were commonly available he had hand-assembled from transistors, resistors, diodes, and military-grade surplus integrated circuits to develop keyboards that responded to note velocity, release velocity, and aftertouch, and also allowed advance functionality including keyboard splits and polyphonic portamento.
By the mids hed created pre-MIDI keyboard controllers capable of transmitting more than twelve separate channels of gate and voltage- control data and handling multiple synth modules, even across multiple networked keyboards. If no keys were played, no processing time was spent. If you hit a single key, the system took one CPU clock tick to acquire the information from the keyboard.
Playing two keys took only two clock ticks. Microprocessors in typical polyphonic keyboards scan all of the keys all of the time, which eats up processing power. Among those whom Pascetta credits for making his keyboards happen is the organ builder and repairman Vince Treanor III.
A era polyphonic, multitimbral synthesizer system consisting of an Armand Pascetta keyboard connected to, at the upper left, a pair of Pascettas networked, four-channel processors stacked above four modified Oberheim SEMs.
Courtesy of Armand Pascetta, Electro Group Relatively few people are aware of Pascettas work; his controller system never made it into full production, and he tells me he sold only twenty of these systems. However, his ideas were revolutionary and many have yet to be duplicated or surpassed.
He reported in that hes once again working at perfecting and producing his keyboard controllers because, he said, it would be fun to push the envelope again and I found MIDI to be obsolete from the day it was invented. Three Armand Pascetta polyphonic keyboards along with a pair of his four-channel processors, photographed in What they released that year, however, was special indeed.
Even though it didnt crush its competitionthe Polymoog, ARP Omni, Oberheim Four Voice, and Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, all built in the United Statesit introduced fresh timbres and ushered into the synth industry some novel controller features, and remains one of the most coveted instruments today.
The CS produces a distinctive, fat synth sound and is simple to use and playonce you get it to its destination and situated on a stand or tabletop ready to go. Not only was the CS one of the first synths with a velocity-sensitive keyboard, but it also introduced polyphonic aftertouch.
Instead of pitchbend and modulation wheels, the CS has a unique ribbon controller; wherever you touch it becomes the center point, and moving away from there bends the pitch, allowing more extensive bends than possible on other ribbons. Back then, synths didnt offer programmable bend ranges like a majority do today. One of its earliest proponents was Stevie Wonder, who played the CS so often that he wore out its ribbon. Electronically temperamental, fragile, and challenging, as well.
Courtesy of Yamaha Corporation of America The Chroma rose like a phoenix from ARPs ashes in and survived through several years of development and production. It remains a highly prized vintage synthesizer, but its mylar membrane front panels are prone to failure and extremely rare today.
Courtesy of Alan R. The electrical engineer Alan R. Pearlman founded ARP in , then directed the release of a succession of synthesizers and keyboards over an eleven-year period. When ARP went bankrupt in , two-year-old plans for a synth called the Chroma were seemingly squandered. Philip Dodds , the vice president of engineering, remained alone at ARP, but he managed to sell the Chroma design to CBS and get hired by the Rhodes division as the director of its production.
The Chroma, which Rhodes manufactured in and 83, is a programmable, sixteen-channel multitimbral, polyphonic synthesizer with an exquisite-feeling sixty-four-note weighted-action keyboard that offers accurate and sensitive velocity response. One concept the Chroma helped usher in, however, annoyed many synthesists: deep menu-driven voice programming with one data slider, two minimal LED displays, and fifty dual-function membrane switches. Previously, single-function buttons, switches, knobs, and slidersone control per parameterabounded on synthesizers, and affirmed knob-twisters and switch-throwers typically find the Chroma programming model foreign, cumbersome, and downright unfriendly.
At least its pre-MIDI computer interface allowed connection to a personal computer for digital recording and reproduction of performance data. In fact, the PC had yet to ship when the Chroma first hit the market. Physical Modeling Some synthesists are content to load a complex patch, play a note, and luxuriate in multi-timbral bliss. Perhaps theyll tweak a knob or two to appear as if theyre actually working hard to produce such a marvelous auditory experience.
Many players thankfully strive for more control and real-time expressivity, and synth developers and manufacturers from time to time address these enthusiasts.
One synth that truly requires active participation is Yamahas VL1, the first commercially available physical-modeling synthesizer. Not only did it introduce a radically new type of synthesis, but it also requires considerable practice for a performer to make it sound good.
Julius O. Toshifumi Kunimoto, acknowledged as the father of VL technology, led an engineering team to convert Smiths waveguide equation into the system that became a real-time musical instrument. Introduced in , Yamahas VL1 delivered powerful new synthesis and control capabilities, but it requires considerable patience and practice to be played expressively.
Playing it with a breath controller can add to its expressive capabilities. The VL1 can reward its player with dynamic musical articulation, which cant be achieved using most other types of synthesisespecially sample playback. Not only is the VL1 tricky to play, but programming patches is extremely difficult because timbre and pitch are interrelated. You might start with a beautiful tone only to ruin the timbre by trying to tune it. Likewise, modifying the timbre of a sound thats in tune can make it untunable, perhaps even unplayable.
Finger-Controlled Speech Among the many innovative electronic devices that came from the creative minds at Bell Laboratories decades before they appeared in consumer products was a speech synthesizer called the Voder Voice Operation DEmonstratoR.
Speech engineer Homer W. Dudley developed it in time for demonstrations at the New York Worlds Fair. The Voder used finger-controlled levers and foot pedals with continuousas opposed to switchedresponses to control parameters that allowed the simulation of human speech. At the core of the Waveboy Voder, which is as of August still available from Chicken Systems, is an effect algorithm that creates a bank of filter frames.
Provided on the Voder 3. When you load the Voder software, the frames are assigned to the bottom sixteen notes of the samplers sixty-one-note keyboard, from C2 to E3.
Playing any of these keys recalls a filter frame, but the keys themselves dont trigger sounds. The speed at which the new filter configuration evolves from the previous one depends on how hard you hit the key. In essence, you can make the sampler talkalthough it will take lots of practice to make the results intelligible. A total of sixty-four filter frames are available at one time, and you can use sources besides a keyboard to sequence through framesincluding pressure, the mod wheel, an LFO, and sample-and- hold for random frame selection.
Chorusing and delay effects are also part of the Voder algorithm. View a filmed Voder presentation at www. This book was released on 01 February with total page pages.
Book excerpt: Electronic music instruments weren't called synthesizers until the s, but their lineage began in with Russian inventor Lev Sergeyevich Termen's development of the Etherphone, what we now know of as the Theremin.
The editor designer prepares a specification that includes rules defining a language's context-free abstract syn tax, context-sensitive relationships, display format, and concrete input syntax.
From this specification, the Synthesizer Generator creates a display editor for manipulating objects according to these rules [Reps84]. This volume, The Synthesizer Generator Reference Manual, is intended as the defining document of the system. A companion volume, The Synthesizer Gen erator: A System for Constructing Language-Based Editors [Reps88], provides a more tutorial description of the system; it contains numerous examples that illustrate the specification and use of generated editors, as well as chapters that explain important algorithms of the implementation.
It featured a display-oriented, syntax directed editor, an incremental compiler, an execution supervisor supporting source-level debugging, and a file system containing syntactically typed pro gram fragments. Although originally conceived as a tool for creating Synthesizer-like environments for arbitrary pro gramming languages, the Synthesizer Generator is more broadly useful. Any textual language with a hierarchical phrase structure grammar is a candidate.
Nowaday, the supper low noise PLL oscillator and the supper low jitter synthesizer have been used in the worldwide communications system. Where, the former is used for the satellite communications and the latter is used for the cellular phone.
The main idea to obtain a supper low noise PLL oscillator is to use a high Q resonator, such as the dielectric resonator, with a suitable phase-locked loop. To design a supper low jitter synthesizer, the best way is to set up a solid background about the synthesizer, which includes: The analogy PLL oscillator linear analysis and nonlinear analysis , The digital PLL oscillator, using the symbol analysis and the analog PLL analysis, The synthesizer, using the symbol analysis and the sample PLL analysis.
This book will provide you all of those information. Meanwhile, provider you the design formulas, design examples and the final schematics. The author have been involved in the design and development of all of those projects above for almost 30 years. Therefore, this book is very clear not only in theoretical analysis but also in experimental.
Step-by-step instructions on topics such as Using Presets, Performance Controls, Editing Presets, Editing in Performanceover musical examples, diagrams and exercises in programming that will assist the novice or experienced musician in achieving a more musical performance. Tracing the development of the Moog synthesizer from its initial conception to its ascension to stardom in 'Switched-on Bach', this text conveys the consequences of a technology that would provide the soundtrack for a chapter in cultural history.
Traces the history of synthesizers, looks at various models and describes how they have been used in modern music. You can start using the book immediately with the SynthLab-DM product, which allows you to compile and load mini-modules that resemble modular synth components without needing to maintain the complete synth project code. All six synth projects are fully documented, from the tiny SynthClock to the SynthEngine objects, allowing you to get the most from the book while working at a level that you feel comfortable with.
This book provides a comprehensive reference for everything that has to do with digital circuits. The author focuses equally on all levels of abstraction. He tells a bottom-up story from the physics level to the finished product level. The aim is to provide a full account of the experience of designing, fabricating, understanding, and testing a microchip. The past century has seen remarkable developments in synthesizers, documented in the first chapter of this book by a historical look at the most important instruments and how they advanced methods of a musician's control, of sound generation, of improved capabilities forlive performance, of interfaces that improved the musician's interaction with the instrument, and of groundbreaking ways to compose music.
Chapter two covers the basics of acoustics and synthesis, including descriptions of individual synthesizer components and how they affect the generation of sound and the production of music. Today's synthesizer industry covers a vast range of devices, from affordable to expensive workstations, from analog to digital to hybrid forms of sound generation,from the expanding universe of software instruments to the vigorously revived world of modular synthesizers, from state-of-the-art all-digital instruments to those that function directly with analog machines of the past, and from synthesizers and controllers sporting traditional interfaces such as the organ- or piano-style keyboard to those that appeal to musicians in search of novel approaches to making music.
Chapter three addresses many of the valuable considerations to make when shopping for synthesizers. The final two chapters outline strategies noted and successful synthesists use to program, compose and perform with, and record the ultimate electronic music instrument. Tracing the development of the Moog synthesizer from its initial conception to its ascension to stardom in 'Switched-on Bach', this text conveys the consequences of a technology that would provide the soundtrack for a chapter in cultural history.
The synthesizer as an instrument has evolved rapidly over the last 50 years, conveying different meanings in musical culture at various times in its history.
For example, post-punk and new wave acts used synths to signify their embrace of futurism and modernity. Earlier psychedelic bands used the instrument to sonically represent mind expansion while prog acts signposted their lineage to the classical avant-garde.
It is now seemingly ubiquitous in modern pop music production. This book is a detailed account of the Synthesizer Generator, a system for creat ing specialized editors that are customized for editing particular languages.
The book is intended for those with an interest in software tools and in methods for building interactive systems. It is a must for people who are using the Syn thesizer Generator to build editors because it provides extensive discussions of how to write editor specifications.
The book should also be valuable for people who are building specialized editors "by hand," without using an editor generating tool. The need to manage the development of large software systems is one of the most pressing problems faced by computer programmers. An important aspect of this problem is the design of new tools to aid interactive program develop ment. The Synthesizer Generator permits one to create specialized editors that are tailored for editing a particular language.
In program editors built with the Synthesizer Generator, knowledge about the language is used to continuously assess whether a program contains errors and to determine where such errors occur. The information is then displayed on the terminal screen to provide feed back to the programmer as the program is developed and modified.
The Synthesizer Generator is a system for automating the implementation of language-based editing environments. The editor designer prepares a specification that includes rules defining a language's context-free abstract syn tax, context-sensitive relationships, display format, and concrete input syntax. From this specification, the Synthesizer Generator creates a display editor for manipulating objects according to these rules [Reps84].
This volume, The Synthesizer Generator Reference Manual, is intended as the defining document of the system. A companion volume, The Synthesizer Gen erator: A System for Constructing Language-Based Editors [Reps88], provides a more tutorial description of the system; it contains numerous examples that illustrate the specification and use of generated editors, as well as chapters that explain important algorithms of the implementation.
It featured a display-oriented, syntax directed editor, an incremental compiler, an execution supervisor supporting source-level debugging, and a file system containing syntactically typed pro gram fragments. Although originally conceived as a tool for creating Synthesizer-like environments for arbitrary pro gramming languages, the Synthesizer Generator is more broadly useful.
Any textual language with a hierarchical phrase structure grammar is a candidate. From acid house to prog rock, there is no form of modern popular music that hasn't been propelled forwards by the synthesizer.
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