Soundhack creator Tom Erbe joins musician-synthesist Sarah Belle Reid for a fascinating dive into the Make Noise Spectraphon, spectral animation, and Buchla history. IYKYK – but if you don’t know, that’s one Hell of a spectral historical West Coast trip.
You really don’t need a Spectraphon to love this one, though it might make you want one. (If it doesn’t, it might make you want to start messing with patching and coding some spectral goodness. I’m still working on an environment to run OG Soundhack on my M1 Mac, too – that’s on the list for this weekend.)
I’m just going to include the full notes here:
A historical and technical deep dive into the synthesizer designs and ideas that influenced the development of the Make Noise x Soundhack Spectraphon, featuring excerpts from an interview with Tom Erbe.
Spectraphon is an oscillator for Eurorack modular systems that allows you to analyze and resynthesize sonic characteristics of OTHER sounds, using those characteristics to create unique waveforms and timbres…with the ability to continuously transform them into something new. It’s Erbe’s unique take on the concept of a harmonic oscillator—inspired by some of instrument designer Donald Buchla’s work from the 1970s and 1980s.
Erbe and Make Noise specifically name three Buchla instruments as important inspirations: the Model 259 Programmable Complex Waveform Generator, the Model 296 Programmable Spectral Processor, and the Touché, a hybrid keyboard instrument developed in collaboration between Don Buchla and David Rosenboom.
This video unpacks each of these instruments in turn, examining how their innovative approaches to timbre control and spectral manipulation influenced Spectraphon’s design.
Special thanks to Tom Erbe for sharing his insights on Spectraphon’s development and its relationship to these historic Buchla instruments, and to the Buchla Archives for providing images.
Sarah Belle Reid has more links to tutorials and purchase links in the full description.
She’s also done a great overview of the Spectraphon module:
Tom you can reach at Soundhack, and for software lovers (or if you’ve run out of money, HP, or both, I feel you), there are great tools there, too, many of them free. Plus for patchers, you get Max and Pd tools, too. Maybe that Spectraphon is interesting but you want to try making your own spectral-animating tool – you go.
Plus there’s the Buchla archives, too – dive into this linkhole, cats:
https://www.buchlaarchives.com