Historically informed design of sound synthesis

In this research project a collection of early electronic instruments from the 1960s-70s is examined to better understand the expressive possibilities they offered.

Purpose and research questions

One important input to creative practices are the affordances and limitations of the materials used to create. In musical creative practices, one such ‘material’ is constituted by the expressions the musical instruments afford. In this project the researchers are inspired by the highly creative experimentation that took place in the early history of analog electronic instruments, partly lost when we shifted to digitally-enabled electronic instruments. Based on a forgotten treasure, the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) collection of historical analog synthesizers from the 60's and 70's, the project aims to create a series of digital electronic music instruments enabling different expressions and instrumental forms.

The EMS synthesizers, stored at Musikverket, are currently not accessible to researchers, nor to the artistic community. The collection contains several idiosyncratic electronic music instruments and studio interfaces from the 1960s and 70s. As this era was a highly creative and innovative period, making the instruments available to a larger audience may spur artistic, cultural and economic development of both Swedish and international popular and electronic music today.

The project will be guided by three research questions that address digitisation, artistic, and exploration processes, respectively:

• What are the qualities in the original analog instruments, and how do we best capture these qualities in the digitisation process?
• Does the proposed historically informed design yield instruments that inspire formally and sonically diverse artistic expression?
• What is the value of an exploration of digital instruments based on sound similarity regarding user experiences and acquisition of instrument-specific expertise?

The following aims of the project support our research questions:

• Develop digital emulations for analog synthesizers (digitisation of (analog) sound synthesis).
• Develop tangible digital interfaces that are inspired by the analog artefacts (digitisation of interfaces).
• Novel approach to instrument exploration.
• Inform design and performance through heritage research.
• Study and improve emulations, interfaces, and visualizations through collaborative design.

The creative process will feed off a combination of heritage research, interaction design, and engineering research on sound synthesis and analysis, inspired by the experimentation in the early history of electronic instruments. The project group will develop and apply a digitisation method to reshape the physical, analog instruments into becoming digital instruments, which will make these instruments and their musical expressions more widely available.

Method and intended outcome

The project is organized in seven work packages, each with their own outcomes:

1. Identification (Year 1).
2. Categorisation (Year 1) will be conducted according to manufacturers, sound synthesis approaches, interface designs, historical background, etc.
3. Standardisation (Year 2). Typical parameter settings and manipulations will be identified as preliminary standards.
4. Allocation (Year 2). Comprises the development of software for sound synthesis, the development of both digital and physical user interfaces, and the generation of sample databases that contain the sounds of the physical instruments in the particular settings defined in WP 3.
5. Exploration (Year 2).
6. User studies (Year 3-4). Composition of new works that make use of the newly available digital instruments will be conducted by students at KMH.
7. Collaborative design (Years 3-4).