UNDERSTANDING SOUND & SYNTHESIS

Exploring Animoog Z can be a rewarding experience, regardless of your level of synthesizer expertise. But to understand the synthesizer, it's a good idea to know a few things about sound, too.

UNDERSTANDING SOUND

The sounds we hear are vibrations in the air, caused by a vibrating source such as the string of a guitar, the reed of a clarinet, or the column of air in a flute. One of the things that makes each sound different is the speed at which it vibrates; this frequency determines the pitch of the sound, or the note. Now, obviously a flute and a guitar and a clarinet playing the same note at the same frequency don’t all sound alike, so there is more to it than that.

In addition to pitch, another factor is how the sound behaves over time. A note played on the guitar will begin to die away almost immediately. The flute and the clarinet will continue to sound as long as the player breathes air into the instrument. And while the guitar can continue to sound as it dies away, the flute and clarinet cease to sound right as the airflow stops. This change in dynamics over time is referred to as the loudness contour.

The last thing we can look at is the tonal content of the sound itself. In musical terms, this is called the timbre (pronounced tam’–br, as in tambourine, not tim’–br, as in a tree falling). Each instrument produces a different waveform, and different waveforms carry a different harmonic content. The flute in our example is very close to a pure sine wave, with little or no overtones. But the clarinet and guitar each have a much more complex waveform, with a distinctive harmonic content. By understanding the pitch, the contour, and the harmonic content of a sound, we can learn how to use the synthesizer more effectively.

UNDERSTANDING THE SYNTHESIZER

Every synthesizer – even an integrated synthesizer such as Animoog Z – is at heart a collection of individual modules. Each module contains specific circuitry to control a certain aspect of the sound being created.

OSCILLATORS

The sound-generating circuitry has no physical moving parts like a guitar string or a clarinet reed. Instead, the Animoog Z oscillators create a digital signal that changes direction very rapidly. Connected to a loudspeaker, that digital signal is converted into an analog signal and then moves the speaker to create the sound we hear. How smoothly the signal changes direction determines the waveform, or wave shape, which in turn determines the harmonic content.

THE FILTER

Animoog Z provides a low-pass “ladder” filter design. Even though each waveform has a distinct harmonic content, using the filter changes that content by selectively removing some of the upper harmonics, which carry a higher frequency. Lowering the FREQUENCY of the Filter will cause more upper harmonic content to be filtered out.

The high-pass mode filters out lower harmonic content, while the band-pass mode focuses on a narrow band around the Frequency and filters out both lower and upper harmonics.

ENVELOPE GENERATORS

The Envelope controls determine how the sound changes over time. The AMP ENV determines how the amplitude, or volume, of the sound changes over time – how fast the sound comes on (Attack Time); how fast the sound falls (Decay Time) to a preset level (Sustain Level) and how the sound dies out after the key, or note is released. The FILTER ENV has the same parameters, but they are used to control the FREQUENCY of the Filter over time, and not the amplitude.

MODULATION

Modulation paths allow the synthesizer modules to interact with one another to create more complex sounds. In addition, dedicated Modulation sources can be assigned to the Modulation controls, and freely introduced as part of a performance.

ASE IN ANIMOOG Z

Animoog’s ASE expands on wavetable synthesis and vector synthesis by using 8 Timbres with 16 waveforms as the X/Y Grid over which Comets dynamically move in space.

Each Comet cross-fades between four waveforms based on the Comet's position.

The selected cross-faded waveforms are:

• the waveform the Comet is currently on,
• the waveform to the right on the same Timbre row,
• the waveform below on the next timbre row, which is a different Timbre,
• and the waveform to the right and below, which is diagonally across from the original Comet location.

When a Comet reaches the edge of the Grid, the Grid wraps around and uses the waveforms at the opposite sides.

Animoog Z goes beyond a single horizontal X/Y Grid with a second vertical X/Z Grid that uses the same 8 Timbres, but is instead pivoted upwards by 90 degrees. The X/Y Grid and X/Z Grid meet at the furthest edge of the X/Y Grid. As a Comet moves upwards in the Z direction it cross-fades between the sound of the X/Y Grid and the sound of the X/Z Grid, adding another dimension of dynamic waveshaping.