Live Demonstration: An Aliasing-Free Hybrid Digital-Analog Music Synthesizer Prototype

Abstract

Analog subtractive sound synthesis is widely used in music production since the 1960s, with popular synthesizers from Moog Music, Sequential, and ARP Instruments. While analog synthesizers are considered superior in terms of sound quality compared to their digital counterparts, analog circuitry typically suffers from temperature instabilities, component variations, and lack of flexibility. Digital music synthesizers can avoid all of these drawbacks, but it is challenging to design digital oscillators and filters that do not cause aliasing artifacts and sound as impressive as their analog counterparts. In this live demonstration, we show a polyphonic hybrid digital-analog music synthesizer prototype in which the oscillator signals are aliasing-free and generated by an FPGA, whereas the filters and amplifiers are implemented with analog circuits, thus combining the best of both worlds.