Understand How an Oscillator Functions in a Homemade Synthesizer

Series Summary

Because of its creative uses of verbal and written communication, music is one of the most interesting forms of expression that exists in the world today. Whether the rhythmic arranging of tones and melodies developed in conjunction with spoken language is still unknown; nonetheless, music is unique in that it facilitates a special conversation between the musician and the audience that exceeds mere words. Music creates a connection between people that is not limited by time, distance, or relationship; a song can speak to anyone, anywhere. That’s why music continually changes and grows, is still loved and still proliferates. Music is a living language.

Now that you know the power of the music, in this free video series, learn how to build your own synthesizer with six oscillators.. Analog synthesizers are synthesizers that use analog circuits and computer techniques to produce an electronic sound that is often heard in music composition. The first analog synthesizers (or synths) were derived from analog computers and involved other electronic modules such as oscillators, filters, amplifiers and generators that were connected by patch cables. Later, all-in-one synthesizers simplified the set-up and made synthesizers more portable and easier to use. Analog synthesizers were slowly replaced by digital components, but in the 1990’s, a revival of the analog synths prevailed.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Lorin Park with Expert Village, and we're talking about building an analog synthesizer from scratch. Not necessarily the easiest undertaking if you think about everything at once, but if you condense it down to its simplest most fundamental ideas, it's really not that hard. What you have to think about though, is that at the heart of any synthesizer is the oscillator, that's what makes sound. Sound is a wave that travels through space, displaces air molecules, but also, in electronics, it's a wave that moves electrons and those electrons then cause our speaker to vibrate. In order to get those electrons moving, we need to have an oscillator circuit. Oscillator describes that it's simply oscillating, moving back and force, that is, that is turns on, turns off, turns on, turns off, lots of power, little bit of power, lots of power, a little bit of power, and we end up creating that fluctuation from low to high that is an audio wave. Simply, an oscillator is a type of an amplifier that's fed back onto itself. The easiest oscillator to create, but probably the most annoying, would be to take a microphone and point it at a speaker. That piercing tone that you hear from the feedback is actually oscillation. However if we use circuitry to "tune" that oscillation, we can create more pleasant tones, and then later we can combine them and create ourselves a synthesizer."