In addition to detailing Sine Machine’s engine and UI, it’s worth taking a shallow dip into the words of acoustics, psychoacoustics, sound and synthesis.
Going through fundamentals provides us with two benefits:
- New learners get a bit of extra help and context.
- Experienced sound designers can gain some insight into why certain decisions were made or why certain constraints are in place.
One classic problem: synthesizers rely on a lot of jargon. When I was starting out, it took me a couple years of toying with software synths before I fully understood terms like Low Frequency Oscillator (LFO) or reliably remembered which term in ASDR referred to a volume and not a time value.
To experienced synthesists, a new synth like Sine Machine will have a lot of familiar mental models. But of course invent a few new ones with strange names like Sharpness or Offset Frequency.
Bleeps and Bloops?
When I first demo’d Sine Machine to my sister, she asked me “Don’t synthesizers just make bleeps and bloops?”
I laughed. Then thought a while before answering her. It’s a valid question. Yes, they do make bleeps and bloops! And no, that’s not the full story.
Early synthesizers were really created and marketed to mimic acoustic instruments like flutes and strings.
The goal of most synthesizers is to make things that sound pleasing or interesting to our ears. This has biological implications which I think are worth examining.
The Source-Filter model of our biology
The “buzz” of a sawtooth oscillator (one of the most classic synth sounds) comes pretty close to the buzz our vocal chords produce.
That buzz is filtered, shaped and modulated by our throat, our tongue and oral cavity.
So, not only do we have a meaty sawtooth oscillator inside of us, we have a complex set of filters and modulation tools at our disposal. And we have many years of experience operating our vocal synthesizers — for both speech and music.
Our ears are able to differentiate quite subtle tonal and spectral variations produced by other humans — it follows that we would model our instruments to produce the same types and ranges of sounds.
Harmonics are important to being human
Hear me out. This isn’t just some philosophical theorizing. Harmonics themselves are critical to human development.
Leave a Reply