Walker Hope

12/10/2012
Electronic Music
Synthesizers
Sounds are nothing more than vibrations in the air. Our ears sense those vibrations and send the
information to our brain, where we hear them as sounds. The vibrations can come from many different
sources. When we use our voices, the vocal chords in our throat vibrate, passing along the vibrations to
the air so people can hear them.
Speakers can also produce vibrations. When a speaker makes a sound, the speaker cone vibrates
back and forth in a way that will produce the sound it wants to make. The speaker knows exactly how
to vibrate to produce a certain sound because there is an electrical signal telling it how to move. A
synthesizer, at its most basic level, is a machine that produces an electrical signal, telling a speaker how
to vibrate so it can make a certain sound.
Synthesizers have parts in them called oscillators. These are the parts of the synthesizer that
tells the speaker what kind of sound to make. It also controls how quickly the speaker is supposed to
vibrate. If it sends a signal telling the speaker to vibrate more quickly, we hear a sound that's higher in
pitch. If it tells the speaker to vibrate more slowly, we hear a sound lower in pitch. The lowest sounds
can just sound like clicks to us because of how far apart the vibrations of the speaker are.
The signal from the oscillator can tell other things how to move, too. One oscillator can tell
another oscillator to change it's pitch up and down. It tells it both how much to change the pitch, how to
change the pitch, and how quickly to change the pitch. This is called frequency modulation. If one
oscillator tells another to change pitch very very fast, it eventually sounds like a single stream of sound
with a consistent pitch, but with very interesting qualities to it.
The oscillator can also control how loud the speakers are playing the sound. For a speaker to
play louder, the cone just moves farther back and forward when it vibrates. An oscillator can control
how far back and forward the speaker cone goes, and make the volume at which it plays the sound

change. This is called amplitude modulation.

Another thing synthesizers have is a filter. This lets it decide which sounds to let through based
on their pitch. It does the same thing as our mouths when we open and close them. Our vocal chords
can be vibrating at the same rate producing the same pitch, but our mouth shape changes how our voice
sounds when it comes out.
Filters can also be modulated by an oscillator. An oscillator can tell a filter to open and close,
just like we can make our mouths open and close. This produces varying sounds from the synthesizer
and is called timbral modulation.
All of these simple components of synthesizers come together and can create a wide variety of
sounds, from recreating sounds in the real world to making sounds that we usually only imagine in our
minds.