Given this, we can design a simple, monophonic synthesizer, as shown in Figure 1 above. The second and third are the changes in brightness and loudness as the note progresses. The first of these is the principal waveform, which provides both the initial tone and the pitch. Numerous other factors determine the exact sound produced, so it's both surprising and comforting to know that we can reduce these factors down to three major attributes for many simpler timbres. In addition to this, many such sounds fluctuate in some way, exhibiting modulations such as vibrato. contains more high-frequency harmonics) at its start than it is at its end. Percussive instruments such as these are loudest at the start of a note and, unless damped, their sounds die away to silence over the course of several seconds. Of course, this isn't the end of the story. As we learned in the very first part of this series, the sound thus produced will have a characteristic tone determined by the nature of the string, and it will vibrate at a particular set of pitches determined by its length and tension. Let's remind ourselves of what happens when, for example, you hit a strike a string within grandma's piano or pluck a string on an acoustic guitar. just because an electronic instrument can play many pitches simultaneously, it isn't necessarily truly polyphonic. So I'll let you into a secret right away. It must be the same on a synthesizer, yes? Well, no, otherwise I wouldn't have asked.īefore we can analyse and judge the various ways in which synthesizers have achieved polyphony, we had better understand precisely what 'polyphony' is. You wouldn't think that there's much to it, would you? After all, we were all brought up with out-of-tune Edwardian pianos, Bontempi organs, five-string acoustic guitars, and whatever else lurked unloved behind the sofa in the living room. "Just like human beings, sounds are born, reach their prime, and die but the life of a sound, from creation to evanescence, lasts only a few seconds." Īh, polyphony. Having explored the way monophonic and duophonic analogue keyboards work, Gordon Reid puts away his Minimoog and Odyssey and descends into the complex world of polyphonic synths to a flourish of complex jazz chords. Figure 4: Why Figure 3 isn't a polyphonic synthesizer. Figure 2: A four-note broken chord played on a low-note-priority monosynth.
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