Inventions and Inventors Volume 1 - Online Public Access Catalog

310 / Electronic synthesizer
A variety of control elements are used to integrate the operation
of synthesizers. Most common is the keyboard, which provides the
name most often used for portable electronic synthesizers. Portable
synthesizer keyboards are most often pressure-sensitive devices
(meaning that the harder one presses the key, the louder the resulting
sound will be) that resemble the black-and-white keyboards of
more conventional musical instruments such as the piano and the
organ. These synthesizer keyboards produce two simultaneous outputs:
control voltages that govern the pitches of oscillators, and timing
pulses that sustain synthesizer responses for as long as a particular
key is depressed.
Unseen but present are the integrated voltage controls that control
overall signal generation and processing. In addition to voltage
controls and keyboards, synthesizers contain buttons and other
switches that can transpose their sound ranges and other qualities.
Using the appropriate buttons or switches makes it possible for a
single synthesizer to imitate different instruments—or groups of instruments—at
different times. Other synthesizer control elements
include sample-and-hold devices and random voltage sources that
make it possible to sustain particular musical effects and to add various
effects to the music that is being played, respectively.
Electronic synthesizers are complex and flexible instruments.
The various types and models of synthesizers make it possible to
produce many different kinds of music, and many musicians use a
variety of keyboards to give them great flexibility in performing
and recording.
Impact
The development and wide dissemination of studio and portable
synthesizers has led to their frequent use to combine the sound
properties of various musical instruments; a single musician can
thus produce, inexpensively and with a single instrument, sound
combinations that previously could have been produced only by a
large number of musicians playing various instruments. (Understandably,
many players of acoustic instruments have been upset by
this development, since it means that they are hired to play less often
than they were before synthesizers were developed.) Another