Personally my future of Synthesis has an analog Filter, most suspiciously designed by some french Guy….
About the Oscillators i don’t really care as long as they produce something musically useful (at least to me).

I’m assuming we’re not talking about the future of Shruthi synthesis but the future of synthesis. I agree with 6581punk that it’s about the interface. I don’t really care about analog or digital, I only care about getting sounds that are useful. I have a Kurzweil K2600XS, built in 1999, that always amazes me. Considering its age, this synth is easily more capable than anything I have tried since. I prefer it over the Korg Oasys, Yamaha Motifs or anything else I’ve tried lately. But, the VAST synthesis architecture is tricky to learn.

What I would like for an interface are increasing levels of complexity. So, level 1 is “idiot-proof”, where I could specify some aspect of the sound and the interface would adjust multiple parameters. Then we could move into more complex models and eventually end up at something like the Nord G2 interface, where there is a plethora of virtual modules waiting to be inter-connected.

The other idea I had considered was to use a bunch of iPods, each running a single module. So, instead of buying various modules for a modular synth, I end up with 20 iPods (or something like that, maybe less-expensive), with each running a module app and each connected to the other(s) somehow by virtual cables.

Just some random ideas really. I think that interfaces should be software, it’s less expensive and inherently more agile than hardware. Sound generation could be anything, I don’t really care.

Randy

I have so many devices where so much potential is unrealised due to poor interfaces. Software editors can help a little. But even a mouse and GUI is a limited interface, it is not tactile. I like to feel controls in my hand.

It’s why I find soft synths less than gratifying.

It depends on the synth. When I talk about unrealised potential I’m talking Korg Wavestation. Its wave sequencing is tedious to program and I have the SR as well. Which has less controls on it than an old FM synth.

Back in the day I had the time to program sounds with such minimal interfaces and I had limited funds to get anything better (although minimal interface rack mounts were all the rage).

Controls are not just about editing either, they’re performance aids.

Then you have a great UI attached to an average sound engine. The JD800.

Subtractive is pretty easy to create a Ui for but FM less so. But the PreenFM is pretty good for something so small. The demos don’t really do it justice.

Here are my 2012-2030 predictions. Some of those might happen in 5 years, some others in 2030 only.

• New Vintage. Fundamental theorem : People want their synths to make the sounds that were on the radio the year they got laid for the first time. This causes quite some inertia. Corollary: There’ll be something totally “vintage” and desirable about cheesy VAs.
• Hyper-resolution. It took time for VAs to sound decently because anti-aliased waveform synthesis is tricky ; and because discretizing analog filters is also tricky. We’re smarter at that but I feel it’s the wrong battle and brute force will work better. I predict that increase in CPU power, the use of new computing architecture (GPU-like without the latency problems of GPUs), or the use of dedicated hardware (FPGA), will cause designers to design synth engines working at very high sample rates (say 10 MHz), or stretchable sample grids (like Spice does) to get rid of aliasing problems. I predict at least one innovation in this domain to come from Finite Element Methods. This will finally bring all the weird modular/analog stuff (audio-rate modulation, feedback…) to VAs. A lot of things will sound better because of that.
• Component-level emulations. So far the process of programming VAs is very empirical – one pinch of sampling, one pinch of theoretical analysis of schematics to derive transfer functions, one pinch of measurements for response tables. I think this is going to be made obsolete by systems with enough computing power to run transistor-level simulations of the original circuits. This is insane brute force but it’ll happen.
• Parameter estimation techniques from audio signals. We’ll be able to record a sound and automatically get a synth preset that approximates it. The same way we have envelope followers, we’ll have “followers” for every musically relevant parameter ; converting our samples into a bunch of automation curves for driving synths. The dream of the fairlight&synclavier – analysis&resynthesis – will happen, but with much better representations than sums of sine waves. Virtual minimoogs will be the new sinewaves ; and this will reduce the boundary between sampling and synthesis. People will sample a cello loop and alter the notes, the phrasing, without even knowing if this is achieved by messing with the original signal à la Melodyne, or by having recreated the sample with a synth model and just tweaking the parameters.
• A synthesis-technique-independent parameter space. You were all talking about UI but you were barking at the wrong tree. No matter how many knobs and touchpanels you put on some synths, they’ll still suck because their parameter set is too vast and do not relate well to concepts understandable by a human. A Shruthi with 2 pots would be easier to edit than a DX7 with 20. There’ll be some effort to develop a kind of general purpose parameter space for sounds (with 30..40 dimensions) with the following properties: 1/ any combination of settings yields a musically interesting sound (so “random presets” are never static or chipmunks squeezed in a fax machine). 2/ a non musically-trained person can roughly explain with everyday words what each parameter does. 3/ there exists a methodology to automatically learn mappings between the parameter space of a synth and this parameter space. This might become the biggest standard in music after MIDI, and will allow portability of synth sounds from one synthesis engine to the other.

I think pichenettes may have ended this thread :) I came here to explain all my future predictions, but all of the stuff I thought about is just a subset of Olivier’s ideas anyway. Specifically I’m most expecting to see/hear “Hyper resolution” (although I think this would see more popularity in combination with granular synthesis techniques than VAs), “Parameter estimation techniques from audio signals”, “Physics in modulation sources”, “Physical synthesis will be itself will be big…”

And yeah, MIDI will still be around, although I imagine some kind of MIDI 2.0 might be commonplace to carry the additional information utilised by more powerful techniques in synths, sequencers and other multi-media systems. It’ll be totally backwards compatible with current MIDI standards, though.

One of the big points of an analog thing (say a minimoog or an arp, or whatever vintage instrument or machine you can think about) UI is the very physical relationship between your fingers and the sound. It’s a purely tactile experience. I’ve often felt a strong difference between twiddling a knob that’s directly, physically modifying the parameter that I want and a knob that’s modifying some software-driven parameter (and the shruthi is unfortunately part of the second category). And please, do not speak about tactile screens or a mouse! I don’t know if it’s a matter of precision, lag or feedback (the physical resistance is part of it), but there’s really a difference lying there that gives you a different feeling about the instrument. Playing a guitar, a real piano, a rhodes or a violin or singing is a purely physical experience. Playing a minimoog is one of them. Playing a software-driven synth is generally different because of the not-so-tactile feel (due to quantification / lag or feedback, i don’t know).

I also remember viewing a video of one famous producer who explains that the things he hates about Pro Tools are its lack of touchy feeling compared to his big analog console, and also the fact that you actually need to read the track names and the parameter names to modify them : reading makes a big difference, since reading involves another region of your brain that the one used when listening to music, and sound in general. That totally makes sense, in my opinion. And that’s far more valuable than this “analog sounds better” cliché, especially when talking about mixing.

So, in my opinion, here lies the UI question:

• you need something that is simple enough to not think about where you’re putting your fingers, or whatever you want to tweak the sound. You only want to do it absolutely instinctively, and really don’t want to read (or count) anything to achieve your goal.
• you need something that makes the relationship between the software / hardware / whatever you use and your ears totally unconscious, or subconscious.

So, I believe that ergonomics really should play an important part in the future of synthesis, and music in general. That’s definitively one of the reasons why analog synths still are so popular. The thing is not about re-creating those classic sounds, or re-creating existing sounds. The minimoog sound once was revolutionnary, and still became an instant classic. The thing is about the way you manipulate your body to generate new shades of sound.

Well, my point is that trying to recreate the exact sound of something real only has a certain application and, frankly, just only goes so far. People spend their whole careers recording orchestra instruments, brass, cymbals, etc. to get every freaking nuance out of it. So you have a multi-sampled instrument and you’re using umpteen different mic’d soundsources all midimapped and, so what? You sound a little like a cymbal or a piano. Meh. When I need this stuff I want it and I have software that provides it. It just doesn’t get me out of bed in the morning. If this is the future of synthesis, to make better synthetic versions of real acoustic instruments, well that’s boring. To me.

What has always excited me and lots of other people is creating sounds that aren’t natural. They are a function of their electronics and their design. They don’t happen anywhere else. Whether digital or analog, that is still the thing that makes me happy and makes me want to spend money. New noisemakers making new noises. That’s what it’s all about.

How well you do that and how well the UI is executed is the difference between cool and classic. There are lots of the former and only a few of the latter.

@MicMicMan: Great post! Totally agree. I'm in the middle of building a modular synth and a massive part of the appeal for me is the tactile interface and knowing if I turn that knob there it will directly influence the sound there in such a way. Cause that is its only purpose in life. I'm not a luddite, computers are great and I'm a child of the computer age, but there's just something that doesn't fit with using a computer to make sound for me. Using it to mix and record sounds is a different thing.

I’m curious about how MicMicMan’s argument applies to polysynths.

When you turn the cutoff knob on a MiniMoog (or on a modular), that directly changes a voltage at the control input of the VCF. When you turn the cutoff knob on a Prophet-5, its value is read by an ADC, written to some RAM location, and later sent to a bunch of DACs/S&H located on each voice. You can’t really have direct action on a polysynth, unless you find five-gang pots :)

Does that mean that all polysynths lack the “direct, tactile” feedback of monosynths?

Incidentally, this lag/feedback thing is why there are only 4 knobs on the Shruthi. Given the CPU constraints, 8 knobs with half the refresh rate felt too slow to me. That’s also why the programmer is not an official Mutable Instruments product.

@toneburst: The Shruthi-1’s ATMega644p * 20 Mhz has more raw processing power than the Prophet 5’s Z80 * 1 Mhz of course, but a huge fraction of this processing power is dedicated to computing the oscillators and modulations, sequencer, then parsing MIDI, handling the display, etc… There’s very little left for scanning controls, and this very little depends on patch complexity.

The Prophet-5 MCU does nothing else than reading pots and sending CV (not even computing envelopes and LFO) – nothing computationally expensive.

Yes it would help.

And when the machines that followed started to do modulations (LFOs, envelopes) in software, shit happened in terms of UI (all those “keypad + data entry pot” interfaces), and shit happened in terms of CV quality (oberheim’s super slow envelopes).

Of course FM and subtractive are both based on things used for other purposes. I suspect nobody has managed to get other electronic or signal processing processes to output anything usable.

If you search around there’s lots of interesting pages about other processes for messing around with signals which might be possible to use to manipulate or produce sounds eg:

http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~gary/307/week5/additive.html

@ Olivier : You’re perfectly right about the poly-synth thing, and I’m not able to give you an answer since i never had the chance to play one of those marvels. Probably some users here can give us some insight.

I’m not telling that all of the software-driven synths (analog polysynths are some of them, obviously) are encountering this issue. But that most of the ones that i’ve tried suffer from it. I can give you the example of my eventide timefactor, which is overall a kickass delay : still, it’s slightly less entertaining to play with self-oscillation on it than on a simple diy pt2399-based delay because of the not-so-instantaneous feel i’ve got. It’s a bit like playing a video game at 30 fps and 90 fps. I suppose there are some gamers lost on this board and that they know the difference that i’m talking about. In theory, above 30 fps you shouldn’t feel the difference, but practically any experienced player could tell you that you need 60 fps or above to get a fine experience, and an overall good immersion. A synthesizers’ UI is all about immersion (or at least, it should be so). And I’m absolutely certain that software-driven synthesizers could achieve that. Probably there are some already. Still, there’s a lot of work left about the ergonomics for a lot of devices.

But maybe i’m totally wrong and i’m only thinking that because i never got the chance of being blind while playing with some devices (i mean : i always knew the technology before playing it).

@toneburst: I don’t agree at all. A digitally controlled synth and an all digital synth will have some similarities in terms of UI (the relative “lag” and “lack of direct feedback” mentioned by micmicman if the CPU is overloaded), but they are still world apart in term of sound generation. Analog filters are hard to recreate digitally, and anything digital oscillating has some aliasing problems – which can be alleviated under some conditions.

I don’t know what kind of bugs the Sunsyn had. From what I’ve read, it’s mostly software bugs – all kind of glitches/crashes due to coding errors and which have nothing to do with the synth being digitally controlled analog or just digital – but since you mention boards, it could as well be PCB routing problems (high noise floor, signals bleeding into each other), and those are typical of analog.

Plus it doesn’t matter how good it sounds, once it has been recorded to 16-bit 44.1khz and compressed to hell then it seems nothing much will be left of it :)

Hi all!
Firstly: great discussion and quality chat!
I wanna go back the post that started this thread: “Stanford University are currently working on a new FMHD synthesis protocol with improved sound generation properties…”. Anyone has an inside info on current status of this FMHD (I presume FMHD = Frequency Modulation – High Definition)? I’m trying a similar thing, and surprise surprise, it seems like useful/meaningful/powerful/flexible/compact/etc etc etc GUI (including the middle layer between the GUI and the sound synthesis core) are in fact the major problematic parts, as has been agreed throughout this thread already.
Anyway, just a few thoughts on the analog emulation: not to advertise any particular brand and company I’ll just say that i vaguely remember how certain emulation of the legendary Fairchild compresor using dedicated DSP has undergone a blind test involving professional studio engineers and succeeded in fooling pretty much the whole crowd it is the original Fairchild. Further, fairly recent analog circuit analysis/modelling methods have actually come to the quality level you can barely distinguish emulation from the true analog devices at about 15% CPU on a duo-core 2.7GHz machine. Really, they way I see it, we are just now entering the era at which old analog devices can truly be emulated at a reasonable CPU cost, so finally analog circuits will loose their last and most important advantage – the quality and character.
Regards, Sash

@MaxZorin: I highly doubt so. We’ve got so many cool things in the DIY world (cheap microcontrollers and development tools, FPGAs, CNC tools…) just because the demand for those technologies in the heavy industries (auto, military, medical…) drove the prices down. Atmel doesn’t make cheap ATMegas for the DIY market in the first place – they made the chip in the first place for a bunch of industrial applications requiring simple MCUs, sold enough of them to get good prices and pay back their R&D… and the DIY scene ripped the benefits…

If there’s no demand for analog ICs in the big markets, I doubt any cheap technology for manufacturing them will appear in the DIY space. The example I would take is that of tubes. Is there any tech nowadays to make those at home easily? They feel so weird and alien compared with today’s technology, starting from their operating voltage. I suspect that something like a SSM chip will look equally alien when compared to 2030 tech – it just won’t “click” with the operating voltages, design techniques and philosophies of the time. We’ll surely have amazing tech to manufacture amazing things orders of magnitudes more complicated than a SSM2044, but the whole idea of using this tech to make a SSM2044 will be silly. Just like we have great tech for transportation of goods or information but it hasn’t lead to any amazing development in the field of horse technology.

Some guys actually build DIY tubes, but they’ve built a whole load of diy tools like pumps and stuff. They’ve learnt to master how to turn glass tubes into actual tubes… It’s not the average DIYer who’s able of doing such things. I’ve only heard of 2 guys worldwide who make their own diy tubes from scratch.
Tubes are still used (and developped?) nowadays when very high power or very high frequency is required.
For now, I’m constituting a nice stock of vintage soviet era tubes :) This technology is fascinating.

But unlike Olivier, I’m not sure that we’ll see a major shift in electronic component technologies within a few decades – I mean, resistors and capacitors will stay necessary and I suppose that we’ll continue working with ‘low’ voltages (0-15v mostly) like the ones we’re handling since the 60s. About fine analog components (like burr brown opamps, ota/vcas), I’ve really no idea about it.

Matches with the German Strategy for the Energiewende™.

SO well have to live with less headroom which doesn’t really matter because KIds already got used to MP3s….

Damn, i forgot again that the future consists of using 250.000.000 Transistors to simulate the behavior of an 16 Transistor Möög Ladder Filter….

Even with infinite headroom, we’ll still probably only use the top 5DB.