Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

motohagiography

The slider interface on the second prototype is very appealing as a UX. His other ones look sold out, and naively I could see custom collector synths from artists become quite a thing.

What I love about making music with synths is you're essentially exploring a fractal overlaid on all possible audible frequencies, modulated by time. There is a kind of romanticism to the analog aspect of it that emphasises how it is a tangible event instead of a sampled representation, which is basically a fluffy idea now because physically humans are indifferent to whether it's one or the other, but the way it comes out in music is that on machines like this, the art of it is something discovered and shared moreso than reflected and produced. It doesn't really matter, but if there were an impulse-buy priced one akin to the stuff at teenage.engineering by this artist or another one, I could see a mini-craze for them.

> you're essentially exploring a fractal overlaid on all possible audible frequencies, modulated by time.

Another way to think of it is that every knob on the synth gives you a new dimension and each patch is a single point in that n-dimensional space. Sound design means exploring that volume by changing coordinates.

I look at synth usability (which is very similar to how a lot of game designers talk about fun) as in part a question of how that space is arranged. How much of that volume produces sounds users will like versus ones they won't? How continuous is it? If I like a sound at point X, how likely am I to like sounds near X, or will moving even a small distance radically change the sound? Can I intuit what neighboring regions will sound like based on the current sound?

I think a big part of why subtractive synthesis has been so successful is that it works well in that model. Most parameter changes are continuous and intuitive. The space feels like it smoothly changes in useful and predictable ways as you navigate.

FM synthesis is really cool, but it feels a lot more like a chaotic universe where there are tiny islands of brilliant sounds separated by empty volumes of noise, or indistinguishable FM bloops.

>The slider interface on the second prototype is very appealing as a UX

Man, particularly for drums that seems so cool. Obviously you can nudge things off the grid in Ableton or whatever DAW, but just to be able to move the sliders as it plays in real time and figure out where things feel right seems like a lovely way to work.

> the art of it is something discovered and shared

That’s what microtonal harmonic structures feel like to me, in the present day. Exploration and sharing of a new but familiar frontier. Even when done digitally.

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