source file: mills2.txt Date: Sat, 6 Jan 1996 19:36:15 -0800 From: "John H. Chalmers" From: mclaren Subject: A wish list for microtonal synthesizers --- Let me tell you a story... The tale starts back in 1975, when Hal Alles at Bell Labs designs a spiffy board that spits out 256 separate additive sine waves & uses it to build the Bell Labs DIgital Synthesizer. Fast forward to 1978: Crumar (then a big synth manufacturer, now defunct) decided to build a digital synthesizer based on Alles' board. 4 years later, Crumar rolled out the Synergy. This instrument was controlled by (gasp!) two Z-80 chips. Super hi-tech, eh? Wow! A full eight bits of computing power! And running at the awesome speed of 4 Mhz!!! Well, now that the laughter's over, here's a sobering thought: The Synergy STILL has, even TODAY, by far the most complex architecture of any digital synthesizer ever built. Hello! Ensoniq? Are you there? Q: What's the most important part of any synthesizer? A: Envelopes, envelopes, envelopes! The complexity of the synthesizer's envelopes ENTIRELY determines how complex and subtle its sounds can be. A synth with the world's most elaborate synthesis algorithm, the most exotic & beautiful wavetables ever designed, and the most sophisticated effects buss in christendom, still sounds like crap if it uses crude 4-stage ADSR envelopes for the oscillators. It's shocking and alarming to me that the Synergy, designed in 1978, STILL has not been approached in the sophistication and flexibility of its envelopes. The Synergy allowed up to 16 envelope points for each oscillator. You could set any two of the points as loop points for sustain when the key was held down. But wait! There's more! You voiced each oscillator TWICE--one 16-point envelope for minimum key velocity, the other 16-point envelope for maximum key velocity. Then the synth interpolated between those 2 envelopes in real time for all other key velocities. This gave the oscillators a remarkably subtle "lifelike" quality. But wait! There's more! You also voiced each oscillator TWICE for the frequency envelopes--which could also contain up to 16 points, for both min and max key velocity. The synth gave you a pool of 32 oscillators. You could assign 'em any way you liked. You could add oscillators or use 'em to modulate one another--MORE flexibility. Not only that, but you could choose from 8 different waveforms--for each individual oscillator. But wait! There's more! Lastly, the Synergy let you set the amplitude of each oscillator for each group of 3 keys--this was essentially what Yamaha now calls "fractional scaling." In effect, a digital formant filter. The result? Unparallelled subtlety and complexity of sound. The Synergy has NEVER been equalled by ANY other digital synthesizer in this regard. It had aperiodic vibrato--that is, it allowed you to mix a controllable amount of digital noise with the LFO...again, giving the Synergy a remarkable lifelike vibrato or tremolo. Now, let's fast-forward 20 years... Desktop supercomputers...cheap 1 gig disk drives... magneto-optical storage...DSP chips cranking out hundreds of MIPs...Csound on desktop machines running at lightning speeds... And guess what? NO synthesizer manufacturer has YET implemented envelopes REMOTELY as flexible and complex as those on the antique 2-Z-80-controlled Synergy of 1978. C'mon, folks! The problem CAN'T be hardware! We've got hardware up the wazoo. We can handle such a synthesis architecture with elan. Today's synths could eat those kinds of envelopes for breakfast. Yet no one, absolutely NO synthesizer manufacturer, has implemented such flexible envelopes. To its credit, Ensoniq has done slightly better than the rest of the synth manufacturers in this regard. Ensoniq's 8-point interpolating amplitude envelopes are the closest I've seen...but that ain't too close. As a microtonal composer, my most basic need is for a synthesizer with complex, flexible envelopes each of whose oscillators can be precisely detuned. The ideal would be a synth that can do what my Csound instruments do: a synth that allows 20-point frequency AND amplitude envelopes with 30 to 60 oscillators at a time in real time. Offer me such a synth with a tuning table, and I'll fight through a nest of amphetamine-crazed echidnas to buy it. Until then, I gotta ask myself: why does the latest issue of Confuser Music Urinal make a big deal about an article that describes a chip with 127 additive oscillators? C'mon, folks. The Synergy offered 32 oscillators (2 banks of up to 16 each) back in 1978. Gimme a break. It's time we moved up to the level of sophistication attained 20 years ago with a pair of 4 Mhz eight- bit Z-80s, don't you think? --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 8 Jan 1996 16:48 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id HAA13530; Mon, 8 Jan 1996 07:48:32 -0800 Date: Mon, 8 Jan 1996 07:48:32 -0800 Message-Id: <9601080749.aa17311@cyber.cyber.net> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu