Synthesis!

As you may have already realized based on yesterday’s article post, we’ve turned over to this month’s theme…Synthesis!

We have more tools than ever that fall under this heading, and there’s been a huge resurgence in modular systems recently. We’re not going to focus exclusively on modular, but I chose that image because of how our friend Ivo Ivanov of Glitch Machines has described it. “It’s like crack for audio people. Once you get in, it’s just a pit you throw all of you money into. You can’t ever stop.” While modular certainly seems to do that, it doesn’t hold exclusive reign. We’re constantly buying software synths, building patches in Max/Kyma/Pure Data, downloading new instruments for NI’s Kontakt player…the list goes on. There’s a reason we do though. Synthesis has long been an indispensable tool to the sound designer; whether it be Ben Burt designing robot voices for R2-D2 and Wall-E, or Skip Lievsay creating the unnaturally long ring of reception desk bell in Barton Fink. So this month, we’re giving Synthesis its due.

As always, Designing Sound encourages contributions from the community. Next month we’ll be discussing documentaries. If you have something you’d like to share with the community on either topic, or on one completely unrelated to them, please contact [shaun {at} this website (dot) org].