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The first commercial digital sound synthesis method was
Frequency Modulation (FM) synthesis
[38,41,39], invented by John
Chowning, the founding director of
CCRMA.
FM synthesis was discovered and initially developed in the 1970s
[38]. The
technology was commercialized by Yamaha Corporation, resulting in the
DX-7 (1983), the first commercial digital music synthesizer, and the
OPL chipset, initially in the SoundBlaster PC sound card, and later a
standard chipset required for ``SoundBlaster compatibility'' in
computer multimedia support. The original pioneer patent expired in
1996, but additional patents were filed later. It is said that this
technology lives on in cell-phone ring-tone synthesis.
As discussed more fully in [264, p. 44], the formula for
elementary FM synthesis is given by
|
(G.2) |
where
-
specify the carrier sinusoid
-
specify the modulator sinusoid
An example computer-music-style diagram is shown in Fig.G.6.
Since the instantaneous frequency of a sinusoid is simply the
time-derivative of its instantaneous phase, FM can also be regarded
as phase modulation (PM). It is highly remarkable that such a
simple algorithm can generate such a rich variety of musically useful
sounds. This is probably best understood by thinking of FM as
a spectral modeling technique, as will be illustrated further
below.
Figure G.6:
Simple FM brass synthesis.
|
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