(original text – in English)
Before we start digging into the mysterious world of many aspects of electronic music I own you a disclaimer:
Writing about all technicalities of the electronic music helps me to understand deeper this topic ehancing me to make research and investigations resulting with better knowledge and better use of those amazing and limitless instruments. If I may by the way share this knowledge with you, it will be an added value to me.
Now, lets go…
In my previous post I wrote about history of synthesisers, their evolution and types. But what exactly synthesisers do? As you may guess, synthesisers have something to do with synthesis – sound synthesis, to be exact.
Synthesis – beside all definitions you can find – is CREATION something that constitutes of the number of basic elements. This word you’ll find in plethora disciplines of human activity. So, we can talk about chemical synthesis, biological processes (f.ex. protein synthesis), collecting ideas and creating complex results. And no exception for music creation.
Why sound synthesis? There are mainly two directions in application of the sound synthesis, one – to discover and create new sounds to enrich musical productions, and the second direction – to copy or re-create existing sounds, like traditional instruments, sounds of the nature, etc. in electronic environment.
Sound synthesis in its early primitive stage was performed by extravagant music creators like “music concrete” composers. They were spending hours recording and cutting magnetic tapes, then putting together some natural sounds and early oscilloscopes sounds, receiving new and never before heard sounds (late 40′ and 50′ last century).
Real explosion of new, complex sounds took place after invention of first synthesisers. Like painters using basic colours, mixing them can get unlimited number of hues and tints, the same synthesisers can do with sound.
It looks relatively simple so far, doesn’t it? But wait a minute. Is there one only sound synthesis? Some sources provide that there are up to 10 different types of synthesis used in electronic music:
- Substractive synthesis
- Additive synthesis
- Frequency modulation
- Wavetable synthesis
- Sample based synthesis
- Vector synthesis
- Spectral synthesis
- Granular synthesis
- Physical modeling synthesis
- West coast synthesis
- …. some sources give even more types, but mostly they are sub-types or modifications of above mentioned main types of synthesis.
The type of synthesis used depends of the type of synthesiser and its producer.
For the description of main types of sound synthesis I invite you to the part 2 of this article.