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Interview with John Chowning, Discoverer of FM Synthesis


pbognar

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Its funny.  I started to watch an interview just last week.  Maybe it was this one; not sure. Maybe it was fed to me by YouTube. In any case, I am sure it was last week.

CONFIRMED:  2023-08-24, this YouTuber's interview. Most likely in YouTube's column that shows videos-we-think-you'd-like-based-on-Google's-preferences/watched-or-liked-video tracking system.

Edited by User 905133
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Great interview, but the title is indulging in a bit of hyperbole. The FM discriminator was invented by Edwin Armstrong in 1933. Saying this fellow invented FM synthesis is like saying Bob Moog invented the ring modulator. In both cases, the real innovation was taking a known technique used with radio frequencies and applying it to audio frequencies.

Despite that minor nit-pick, I appreciate this kind of coverage because it's musical history that might otherwise be lost to time. I'd love to sit down with this pioneer and just let him reminisce about what was a truly exciting time to be experimenting with electronic music.

I remember the rush I got in 1973 when I connected two signal generators together and heard what two drifting square waves sounded like as they interacted with one another. I had "discovered" pulse-width modulation. I decided then and there that I would build my own synthesizer, but finding information about such things was very difficult in 1973. My synth never happened because I was stymied by my inability to build a stable VCO.

My proto-synth did have a nice white noise generator, though, which I later built in to my Oberheim SEM. That led to my first home-brew drum machine, based on a sequencer I'd originally designed as a keyboard scanner. It was an exciting time, full of possibilities. 

Fast-forward to today and lazy now-me is content to click a virtual "button", an illusion made up of glowing dots  on a computer display labeled "white noise".

 

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