Oral history of John Chowning, inventor of FM synthesis [video]

Oral history of John Chowning, inventor of FM synthesis [video]youtube.com

87 points•Rochus•3 days ago•32 comments•

#chowning #x2f #john #john chowning #inventor #oral #synthesis #history

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Chowning

32 comments

I was lucky to be given a lecture on FM synthesis by John Chowning himself during his visit of my home town about 20 years ago. As a kid that grew up playing a Yamaha DX11, that was a great moment.

matthewdgreen2 days ago

As a kid who grew up playing a DX27S and an FB-01, I once had dinner with John Chowning and Max Matthews at Max’s house. Unfortunately they served tomato aspic, so I was too busy trying to wash that down with sips of water to ask the questions about FM synthesis and optimization that I really wanted to ask. Which mostly involved which crazy tricks they had to use to pack six operator FM synthesis onto whatever ridiculously primitive DSPs they had back in those days. By that time, John had moved on to studying physical modeling synthesis, and I lost track of the field after that.

bradishungry3 days ago

I had a few brief conversations with John a few years back when I was helping a friend out at a synthesizer convention. What was extremely interesting to me is that he seemed relatively uninterested in FM synthesis from a musical point of view, at least he made it sound like at the time that was not his interest, and he was just very interested in a computer science point of view. The musicians I was with were very surprised about that. I could kind of understand it as a computer science student at the time and a musician, but it was still really surprising that such a monumental contribution to music was created by someone who wasn’t really focused on that at all!

TheOtherHobbes3 days ago

He worked with a synthesizer programmer and patch developer named Dave Bristow while at Yamaha. There was a lot of mutual respect and a certain amount of mutual incomprehension, because Chowning wasn't really thinking about FM musically. Nor were the original Yamaha engineers. The predecessor to the DX series, the GS-1 and GS-2, initially had a lot of harpsichord-like sounds.

The DX7 was a hit because of the polyphony and touch sensitivity, but also because the presets - especially the synth basses and e-pianos - were so obviously musical and immediately useable.

But then you listen to the music Chowning was making, and you can already hear a lot of the tone quality. It's academic electronic music, so no bass and e-piano, but it's pretty impressive for 1977. So it's clear he was musical in his own way, but more not interested in using synths in pop than not interested in music at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=988jPjs1gao

hananova3 days ago

The name FM always bothered me. You're not modulating the frequency, you're modulating the phase. PM would be a better name.

If you were to modulate frequency, well first of all you'd have to define a reference point or you'd just get glitchy sound. In practice that means most FM implementations just have a highly oversampled single cycle of a sine wave in memory, and it's the speed at which the sample pointer consumes the looping sine that's set to correspond to some frequency, and then that value is modulated. In other words, phase modulation.

boomlinde3 days ago

Phase modulation is essentially

    sin(phase + modulator * modulation index)

For a non-DC modulator without discontinuities it does result in an effective modulation of the frequency. You can think of phase modulation as a means to achieve frequency modulation with certain desirable properties that distinguish it from other methods.

gugagore3 days ago

d/dt phase = frequency

that matches

> it's the speed at which the sample pointer consumes the looping sine that's set to correspond to some frequency

The rest of your message doesn't make sense to me. Both phase and frequency can be modulated, perhaps most clearly seen with FSK vs. PSK.

stefanwebb3 days ago

This is really interesting! I created a short recently about FM synth with some cool animations that may be of interest to folks: 3 AMAZING facts about FM synthesis https://youtube.com/shorts/yrZrM2-S5mE?feature=share

Synaesthesia3 days ago

He also made some music which is very interesting and weird sounding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=988jPjs1gao

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