The Modular Explosion - Deja Vu or Something New?

Modular Synthesis was supposed to be over by the 80s. Already in the early 70s, the MiniMoog and its defaultsynthesis-path spawn sounded a gradual death knell for the great modular rigs that grew stronger with microprocessordriven analog systems that had all their ‘patching’ managed digitally. As the 80s unfolded, MIDI and digital synthesis seemed to have sealed the modular coffin, and those hulking rigs grew silent, drifting into disrepair and being discarded or sold for a song at auction. Those of us who had working modular rigs would make sheepish excuses for why we still used them. Things have changed over the last years, there’s been an explosion in modular systems, with more companies making them now than in their heyday a half-century ago. What’s going on here, and what’s special about these things? This paper examines this question from several perspectives, exploring the allure of modular systems, what they’re good at, and extrapolating where technology might be bringing them in the relatively near future. I also introduce the large one-of-akind modular system that I designed and built between 19751988 (composed of circa 125 custom modules) and illustrate some of the more unique modules and how I use them now, including the recent Patchwork system that allows people to interact with it via the web. 1. Analog vs. Modular At the dawn of commodity commercial digital synthesizers, analog synthesis was thought to be over. The trade magazines were filled with sleek photos of very agile digital synthesizers sporting all manners of LCDs and buttons to interact with elaborate menus, and old analog synthesizers were disposed of as ‘junk’. But it seems that we acted too quickly. Infatuated with the crispness and acrobatic novelty in digital sounds, musicians crowded into the digital pool. Listening now to music coming from that era of the 80s, the sounds made by real-time commercial digital synthesizers tend to be brittle, simplistic, and iconic, the former reflecting hardware limitations and the latter perhaps because it was too easy to rely on presets musicians would just choose their sounds from a menu without any significant tweaking. Things are different now. Even though embedded digital hardware has advanced enormously and is capable of wielding infinitely more sonic power, analog synthesis has regained respect. The old gear is now tremendously valuable and hybrid synthesizers that have analog and digital sections are common (the old analog synth ASICS, such as the Curtis Electronic Music [CEM] chips are again in production!). Advocates talk lovingly about analog sonic ‘haze’ and the aesthetic and interesting ways in which analog systems can intrinsically go into overdrive, etc. Analog hardware naturally and even gracefully produces such artifacts since beneficial ‘unintended’ features, like different manners of progressive distortion, come for free via circuitry operating outside of normal bounds or ‘suboptimally’ implemented. These artifacts must generally be explicitly built into a digital system. This is a world that effects pedal designers have exploited for many decades [1,2], where boutique manufacturers even scavenge particular vintage transistors for particular sonic characteristics. In principle, however, nearly everything about analog synthesis, even such symbiotic ‘nits’, can be simulated digitally now at good fidelity and with much more flexibility, soon even learned by example from the original hardware without a detailed pre-defined causal model. Hence the days of mainstream ‘analog’ may again be numbered. But the recent resurgence of modular synthesis is different. Modular synthesizers, even dating back to their genesis in the late 60s through mid 70s, weren’t purely analog devices. Most had digital functions as well – e.g., sequencers, clocks, and logic gates for trigger conditioning. Even the moniker ‘Subtractive Synthesis’ that modulars were tarred with for much of their tenure is a diminutive exaggeration – many modules, even in the early days of modulars could add harmonics, distortion, and otherwise thicken up a sound under voltage control, and not just filter complexity away. The fundamental idea behind modular synthesis is not how the noise is made, but rather the concept of patching, where the artist is surrounded by an array of compatible hardware to produce, sculpt, nuance, and control sound, and exploit his or her sensory-motor skills to produce a complex sonic or musical environment. The next sections will explore this in more detail. 2. Where did modular systems come from? Patching and modularity have very deep roots in both electronics and audio. Patching is most commonly associated with the dawn of telephony well over a century ago, when operators would manually patch calls across lines using cords terminated in what we still commonly call ‘phone jacks,’ said to go back to 1878 [3]. Patchbays have long been fundamental to radio and recording studios [4] not long after they were enhanced by the vacuum tube, enabling audio to be flexibly routed. Electronic test equipment, from which early electronic music systems were derived, tends to be modular, with each piece of gear realizing a particular set of functions. Analog computers [5] were also established by the 1950s – these enabled engineers to ‘program’ solutions to differential equations by patching analog integrators, differentiators, and other linear components together via front panel jacks. Although patching was common in audio and electronics, musical instruments prior to the mid-60s generally were conceived as discrete, stand-alone units. From the Martenot to the Ondioline, from the Novachord to the electronic organ [6], electric instruments tended to be standalone closed systems that made their sounds with their own control interface (rare distributed instruments like the Choralcelo [7] existed from 1910, but this was mainly a single control console that drove distributed electromechanical synthesizer/transducers, and, as extensions were wired in by the company, it wasn’t open-ended and reconfigurable). The notion of a musical instrument as a ‘kit of user-reconfigurable parts’ was an alien one, perhaps because pre-existing acoustic musical instruments, which