The Synthesis Handbook

The communications technologies that electronic musicians started to make musical in the 1970s have directly informed operations of vocal cloning and voice identification that are at the heart of synthetic media today. The Synthesis Handbook will offer a political hermeneutics of these important cultural texts, from ‘musical’ instruments designed to be played, to autonomous algorithms that elude direct scrutiny. The questions it will explore are:

How should we interpret the material and immaterial forms (concepts, algorithms, models, patents etc) that make ‘synthesis’ possible as a musical and cultural technique?

What literacies are required for us to understand the cultural implications of these increasingly pervasive—but often opaque—technical objects?

What logics of association might suggest themselves if we were to abandon the discretisation of synthesis into teachable units organized by difficulty or linear chronology (as found in instruction textbooks) and instead connect synthesis techniques by purpose-built critical concepts?

Through workshops, invited contributions, and other fora, we seek to open up the histories, contexts, and frameworks via which we might understand these nested media artifacts, going beyond function to understand their aesthetics, poetics, techné, histories, and politics. The result will be an open access reader with working synthesis examples — a prototype for which is available on this page.

• Introduction — What the Handbook is, how to use it, and what each entry contains.
• Code — Downloadable source for every entry, adapted to run in a local SuperCollider.
• Glossary — A working lexicon of terms, concepts, and naming conventions used across the Handbook.
• Bibliography — Collected references from all Handbook entries.
• Cite — How to cite the Handbook and its entries, and why entries are cited as encyclopedia entries rather than as web pages.

• Pulsar Synthesis — A microsound technique for generating pitched tones, noise bands, and rhythmic textures from trains of electronically generated sonic particles.

The Handbook is conceived by the SYNCULTURE team and designed by Marcin Pietruszewski. Entries will be authored by members either individually or collectively. Eventually, we will invite a community authorship model, in which entries can be proposed, authored, extended, and corrected by readers. A first entry, on pulsar synthesis, is authored by Marcin Pietruszewski.

The code on the pages is not a proxy for the technique—it is the technique. Supercollider runs in the page, which enables the reader to make and manipulate sound as a technique. Nothing installs, every cell can be edited, and every entry ends with the same material adapted to run in a local SuperCollider. The introduction sets out how a session works.

Source for each entry is available from the entry itself, under Code download. The SuperCollider runtime is GPL, and the notice accompanying the compiled binaries is served with it.