Bleeps and Bloops?
When I first showed a demo of 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.
The goal of most synthesizers is to make things that sound pleasing or interesting to our ears. And that often means making sounds that are familiar in timbre to what we already know.
Mimicking real instruments
Early synthesizers were created and marketed to mimic acoustic instruments such as flutes and strings.
For example, Wendy Carlos would expertly recreate entire orchestras playing Bach on Moog synthesizers.
Dealing With 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 (answer: Sustain).
To experienced synthesists, a new synth like Sine Machine will have a lot of familiar mental models.
But of course we invent a few new ones with strange names like Sharpness.
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