“I wanted to have a sound of the future and I said, ‘Wait I second, I know the synthesiser, which is the sound of the future.” These are the words of Giorgio Moroder from the thoroughly skippable spoken-word prog-funk work-out Giorgio by Moroder on last year’s Random Access Memories by Daft Punk.
Moroder is speaking specifically about his time in Germany in 1969, but the statement still feels true. Synthesisers are still representative of futurist veranda to both listeners and creators alike, despite also being objects of retro-kitsch obsession, lusted over for their “purer”, analogue virtues, even in the case of those machines which contain digital mechanisms inside.
Sonically however, the synthesiser signifies a typically 20th century break with representationalism and embrace of the abstract. It’s the point at which we stop understanding – in a most childlike sense – *how* the sound happens. It’s not like it’s easy to explain *exactly* what is happening in a piano or a tuba, but for the most part, you get the point. Something is hitting something else; air is being pushed through some specific space (just imagine yourself whistling); some string is vibrating at a certain rate. With a synthesiser those causal explanations disappear into the abstractions of circuitry and electricity.
Even with the familiar white and black façade of the keyboard as a human input system attached, the synthesiser is seens as a box of mystery that represents science in that most space-race of ways. The bleeps and bloops we associate with it conjure computers, robots and historical representations of what the future was supposed to look like. This is no doubt in part because of the use of early electronic instruments in soundtracking science fiction television, radio and film by people like Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (on Dr. Who) and Wendy Carlos (on A Clockwork Orange).
There is a huge variety in methods of synthesising sounds electronically, but the most common is to take a raw, rich signal (from one or more steady electronic source) and hone it back into something more desirable. A pretty useful analog to this scenario is the human voice. The voice box itself just creates a buzz in the throat, but that sound is sculpted deftly by the spaces it moves through (the throat and the mouth) and mechanisms within (tongue, lips, etc.) to produce words, language, music, yelps, anything.
The classic image of the synthesiser, derived from the first popularly available Moog units in the 1960s, is of a daunting box of knobs and wires that looked like an old fashioned telephone exchange. These wires connected modules, each of which changing the sound in some way. They were essentially doing a particular mathematical function with signal it took in and giving a different signal out. The most common example is to filter out either high or low frequencies above or below a certain threshold, but could range to much more complicated procedures. How these wires and modules were ordered is akin to where you put a multiplication sign or a set of brackets in a maths equation, each arrangement producing slyly different results. This type of arrangement, be it simple or über-complex, is found in all sound design.
While a naked waveform is a looping, static representation of sound through electricity, what makes interesting and intelligible sounds is how they happen over time. For example a piano has sharp, percussive hit of hammer on strings, whereas a trumpet depends on breath and embouchure of the player’s mouth and begins slowly. The magic of the synthesiser – both in this precise context and in general – is its ability to recreate both these pre-existing human reference points of how the sound happens over time and every otherwise conceivable contrast between and beyond. The variations are endless: the sound of the future.
Start Here:
The Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Rhoads [MIT Press]
This ain’t no Synthesis For Dummies, oh no. This book could prop up a small building. A thorough examination of practically every form of synthesis in sound design, from a pretty theoretical level. A real theory work-out. More wave graphs, less knobs and sliders.
The equivalent of IMDB for synthesiser. A constantly expanding log of synthesisers of every type that has ever been encountered, followed by pages of comments of guys reminiscing about the time they owned one of them.
There’s no better place to find out about synthesisers than to actually buy one muck around with it. A totally legitimate way to find out how to make laser sounds under the pretense that its art or music or whatever. Don’t bother with eBay, keep it local.
Words: Ian Lamont // Illustration: Fuchsia MacAree
