9

The breathtaking developments in the digital world are best illustrated by the following
example. The first program that emulated sound generation entirely by means of a
computer was Music I, authored by the American programmer Max Mathew. Invented in
1957, it ran on a university mainframe, an exorbitantly expensive IBM 704. Unimpressively,
its sole claim to fame was that it could compute a triangle wave, although doing it in real
time was beyond its abilities.
This lack of capacity for real-time performance is the reason why early digital technology
was used solely for control (and storage) purposes in commercial synthesizers. Digital
control circuitry debuted in 1971 in the form of the digital sequencer found in the Synthi
100 modular synthesizer—in all other respects an analog synthesizer—from English
company EMS. Priced out of reach of all but the wealthiest musicians, the Synthi 100
sequencer featured a whopping total of 256 events.
Ever-increasing processor performance made it possible to integrate digital technology
into parts of the sound generation engine itself. The monophonic Harmonic Synthesizer,
manufactured by Rocky Mountain Instruments (RMI), was the first instrument to do so.
This synthesizer had two digital oscillators, combined with analog filters and amplifier
circuits.
The Synclavier, introduced in 1976 by New England Digital Corporation (NED), was the
first synthesizer with completely digital sound generation. Instruments like the Synclavier
were based on specialized processors, which had to be developed by the manufacturers
themselves. This development cost made the Synclavier an investment that few could
afford.
An alternative solution was the use of general-purpose processors made by third-party
computer processor manufacturers. These processors, especially designed for multiplication
and accumulation operations—common in audio processing tasks—are called digital
signal processors (DSPs). Peavey’s DPM-3, released in 1990, was the first commercially
available synthesizer completely based on standard DSPs. The instrument was 16-note
polyphonic and based mainly on three Motorola 56001 DSPs. It featured an integrated
sequencer and sample-based subtractive synthesis, with factory presets and user-definable
samples.
Another solution was to design synthesizers as a computer peripheral, rather than as a
standalone unit. The growing popularity of personal computers from the early 1980s
made this option commercially viable. Passport Soundchaser and the Syntauri
alphaSyntauri were the first examples of this concept. Both systems consisted of a
processor card with a standard musical keyboard attached to it. The processor card was
inserted into an Apple II computer. The synthesizers were programmed via the Apple
keyboard and monitor. They were polyphonic, had programmable waveforms, envelopes,
and sequencers. Today’s sound cards, introduced in countless numbers since 1989, follow
this concept.
376 Appendix Synthesizer Basics