The Art of Noise

Synthesizers are amazing musical devices because they allow you to explore the realm of sound that exists between music and noise. Throughout musical history composers and musicians have seemed to be on an irreversible harmonic path towards entropy, first with the allowed use of harmonic dissonance and now with the introduction of new timbres into the composition process - yes, noise can now be music too.

Synthesizers are the last step on this road away from the perfection of agreeable harmony and towards a richer world of contrasting and sometimes dissonant tones. Indeed it is the very nature of a synthesizer to create sound from nothingness, and from this state all possibilities are encountered and all sounds are made equal .

This division between music and noise was first formalised in the early 20'th century by futurist Luigo Russolo. He was rather ahead of his time and spoke of breaking out of the limited circle of sounds which made up music at the time. Technology at the time demanded that sounds were produced by physical instruments, and tradition demanded that these instruments did not change very much over time. However all of this changed when the synthesizer came into being and managed to free sound from the physical nature of its instrumentation.

Analog synthesizers create sound wave replicas of electronic circuitry and digital synthesizers create abstracted representations of sound waves; but either way the final created sound is not limited by the material nature of the instrument. Because of this a composer or sound designer has unlimited freedom with regards to the construction of sound, a situation that has never existed before in the history of music.

Music is best defined as periodic intervals of vibration, and noise as irregular and fragmentary intervals of vibration. Synthesizers are equally capable of making both of these types of sounds and everything in between, and because of this the very existence of musical synthesizers breaks down this dichotomy between music and noise and frees sound from what is really a meaningless division.