Digital synthesizer
A digital synthesizer is a synthesizer that uses digital signal processing (DSP) techniques to make musical sounds. This in contrast to older analog synthesizers which produce music using analog electronics and samplers which play back digital recordings of acoustic, electric or electronic instruments.
History
The very earliest digital synthesis experiments were made with general-purpose computers, as part of academic research into sound generation. In 1975, the Japanese company Yamaha licensed the algorithms for frequency modulation synthesis (FM synthesis) from John Chowning, who had experimented with it at Stanford University since 1971. Yamaha's engineers began adapting Chowning's algorithm for use in a commercial digital synthesizer, adding improvements such as the "key scaling" method to avoid the introduction of distortion that normally occurred in analog systems during frequency modulation, though it would take several years before Yamaha were to release their FM digital synthesizers.
