Apology Of Sound Synthesis

When they appeared, synthesizers were by large rejected as a legitimate musical instruments by existing musical circles. Circles of classical music probably went the furthest in anti-propagating synthesizers. Relationship of traditional classical scene towards synthesizers is maybe best illustrated by Stravinsky – avant-garde Stravinsky, who partially sympathized electronic instruments - once saying: “monster does not breathe”. During 1980s there was even a petition on Paris Conservatory to ban the synthesizer. They were seen as “instruments of darkness”, and new possibilities they brought as artistically irrelevant:

“And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,

The Instruments of darkness tell us truths,

Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s

In deepest consequence”

William Shakespeare, Magbeth

It's funny that synthesizers were viewed in this light. Actually, since the synthesizer is not limited in its timbres, it could be said to be to traditional instruments what an ocean is to a swamp. But it was difficult to convince frogs that the ocean is more beautiful than a swamp. Synthesizers are to remain systematically satanized throughout XX century, and to a lesser degree it still are.

The first reason seems to be that synthesizer sound is in a way sound coming from nowhere - from the inside of the machine or from a world we can’t know what actually is. But this same thing delighted others. Jean Michel Jarre, one of the most uncanny experimentators with synthesizers to nowadays, saw romance in this immaterial source of synthesized sounds:

“Contrary to a widely held opinion, electronic instruments are the most poetic. For the first time, they make their’s own sound”. Jean Michel Jarre

Indeed, if what some philosophers hold true - that the exaltation with a piece of art comes from witnessing of something becoming out of nothing, than electronic music is among the most exquisite artistic experiences we can have. Since the aim of sounds in music is to evoke, suggests something which is not there - which is why every art is there for – synthesized sound is by nature artistic sound.

Another reason for rejection of synthesizers is analogous to the story of king Solomon making the base for his temples from unabrazed rocks, for church can not stand on purely human base. On the same way, it is thought that music can’t exist on a purely human base of synthesized sounds, but has to start from “real”, natural sounds. In other words, electronic sound was considered “too human”. Traditionalists claim that materials of human creations – in art or elsewhere - must not be divorced from natural sources, even if that means being more imperfect, “uglier”, as not to lose connection with divinity, so acoustic aesthetics can be seen as the only legitimate, where with electronic sounds, music is losing divinity, the “connection with God”. One could here wonder, if something is more divine than why is it uglier? Anyway there is a misunderstanding here. In music we care for our experience of sound, which is where divinity is to be found, and not the arbitrary physical source of sound. A violin sound stand for one idea of sound, that can be produced on this or that way, with many different violins or with a synthesizer.

The third reason was the blunt one − some people simply said that synthesizers are cold, distant, repulsive, inhuman. “You can’t hug the synth like the violin”, they said. But this certainly wasn’t how synthesizer musicians saw them. They loved these machines. Synthesizer was probably more rarely if ever hugged, but it was seen as a door towards the magical world of sound, a mystical and soulful world not quite like the natural sound world we all know well, but being a sort of metaphysical basis to it. In synthesizers, electronic composers saw the terrain of divine play. They were the masters of these machines, sitting in theirs studios like Gods, and could feel happy like children when presented with a new instrument.

"Music Maker", September 1982, Article by René van Broekhoven, translated by Ivar de Vries:

The conversation turns to the studio and we discover an aspect of mister Vangelis which until that moment had been hidden away from us. He’s fond of electronics in general, but especially crazy about electronic "gadgets". He gives a careful overview of the studio-apparatus he uses, which I will pass on here for those interested. There’s a 32-channel Quad Eight table, and American product which we don’t often encounter in Europe. Monitoring happens through two enormous Tannoy Dreadnought loudspeakers fed by three (high/middle/low actively separated) BGW 750 final amps. Separation filters also from Tannoy. The multi-track machine was constructed by Lyrec, with two Ampex master-machines present. Additional apparatus is hardly present, which makes sense due to the nature of the recorded material. After all, when some synthesizer-sound has been assembled, in practice nothing much will be changed. Nevertheless there’s an Orban equalizer, an Audio & Design Compex compressor, a couple of Urei limiters, a Vocalstresser and finally a rack with DBX hiss-reduction. In connection with the latter he gives a funny line of argument as to why he uses DBX instead of Dolby for example. He happens to be after the sometimes "audible" effects of DBX, much less so with Dolby. Apparently this helps out with percussion especially. Well, it’s an opinion of course. On the mixer a large number of channels are indeed taken up by fixed instruments. These have been neatly written down on a PVC-bar just above the channel-faders, probably to assist the work of Miss Purple (who we hear later is his technical assistant). During this technical exposition suddenly a boy enters with under his arm an old Phillips (!) radio. Vangelis has all of a sudden forgotten about us and rushes off towards him. Together they closely inspect the radio, which the boy has dusted off and repaired for him, as it turns out. With a cherished look in his eyes our star caresses the round forms of the brown Bakelite. Once turned on Radio One still comes out quite decently. In ebullient mood, Vangelis shows us the "tone-control" of the machine: "It’s all there, you see?? More than forty years old and it’s all there! Man, I love those things...I really do!"

This boyish enthusiasm for the machine was comparable with the love that a car drivers feel for theirs car, a pilot for his airplane, or the captain for his ship. This spirit of love for the machine, and the free exploratory spirit of the child, could as well be felt stemming from theirs music, impressing all those boys out here also fond of art and machines. Machine is not just a dead object; in it we see humans idea and intention, human work and determination. In the past machines were too rough and simple to be anything more than useful tools; but in XX century they became complex enough to be seen differently, to be experienced as being impressive, beautiful. This needs not be explained to a lover of plains, or cars, or computers; and in music, it was the synthesizer.

The next reason for repulsion towards synthesizers is the stance that synthesizer sounds are “in-natrural”. But what is important to realize, is that the sound that comes from a synthesizer is not a “synthesizer sound”, but simply sound. Electronic sound is not an addition to the world of sounds, but is the world of sound itself.

“Synthesizer is like a mirror over the world, which is the same as nature.” Vangelis

Many sounds can never spontaneously appear in nature around us, yet they are as natural as other sounds, and equally have artistic potential. With synthesizers, music can be erected directly from the richness of these natural sounds. A good example of such music is 1976 Oxygene album by Jean Michel Jarre. It was precluded with many other electronic pieces ranging from progressive rock, over movie music to academic music, yet it was this work to finally convince that building music from basic elements of sound is the future. The overture of JM Jarre's Oxygene, despite as the rest of the album being completely synthetic, was able to evoke underwater world better than acoustic instruments; and as the opening of Oxygene was impressionistically conveying underwater world, like geometrically analyzing it, one could be amazed that we needed all that artificiality and science in order to compose for the first time the genuine music of the sea.

“I said to her that old Hindus new perfectly well of all-inclusive presence of all powers and deeds, and that technology revealed and brought to general knowledge only tiny fraction of this fact”. Herman Hesse, The Stephen Wolf

Certainly, electronic sound can also sound artificial. But this must not mean anything bad. Such sounds are humanly organized, humanly imagined; so they stand closer to our nature than acoustic. Electronic sounds are more regular, and therefore more beautiful.

It is actually probably this secret realization that electronic music may be more music than acoustic, that made traditionalists so passionately against electronic music. “No love wants love greater than itself”, as Nietzsche said. Unlike the sound of traditional instruments on which we are accustomed to and that belong to immediate, natural kingdom, sound of the synthesizer belongs to an abstract, spiritual kingdom – on the same way on which music itself belongs to such a kingdom, so in this way electronic music is more, and not less, music then acoustic. Now we are potentially able to reach in sound the divinity reached through melody, harmony and rhythm buy classical composers. What Bach used to say is that only when natural singing is artistically beautified it becomes true art; and synthesizer allows us to touch-up the sounds as much as we wish, at least theoretically. A work like Oxygene clearly showed that this can also be practice.

One of the first experimentators with electronics, Edvard Varese, dreamed of music in which the “sound is like the living matter”. Instead of being seen as unnatural, electronic sound can be thought of as “super-natural”, living sound; as life itself is super-natural in comparison with dead world. Electronic sound can so be thus considered a 'spiritual sound'. There is something sacral about sound synthesis. People often experience electronic music as “cosmic” even when thematically it has nothing to do with cosmos, and this is not without a reason. Independently of what electronic instruments are, sound itself is more then we think it is: when it is artistically articulated, when we are actively aware of it, not receiving it casually and half-consciously, but noticing all its tremblings and structures, if we became actively aware of the sound, we realize that it may be our most intimate connection with the Universe.

I left the most powerful source of fear towards synthesizers for the end: synthesizer is seen as pushing humans away, dwarfing them. It is often thought that complicated electronic instruments make a musician less important, supposedly being able to make music without musicians virtuosity. But a Jean Michel Jarre quote is a best answer to this:

“The more sophisticated the instrument, the more vital the hand of a musician”.

Vangelis: “What I have been saying for a long time is that the era of the synthesizer, which is now only at a very early stage, will one day be very important. People don't seem to understand this very easily, but I have been talking about synthesizers for the last 20 years.”

Bob Doerschuk: "Yes, but still there are many people who shut the door on synthesizer music only because it is played on synthesizers".

Vangelis: "It's unfortunate for them, but that's not my problem. There's nothing I can do. It's a psychological problem for people who need to accept other things in society too".