Sound sampling and digital synthesis

EE 36 November 1986 SOUND SAMPLING AND DIGITAL SYNTHESIS by D Doepfer C Assail Nowadays, phrases such as sound sampling and digital synthesis crop up more and more often when "insiders" are talking about electronic music or electrophonic instruments. Although on the face of it these two concepts have little in common, this is a false impression as the following article shows. A sound sampler is in- tended to be fed with a random range of sounds, process this if required, and output it as a series of discrete tones. Chang- ing the frequency of the tones is normally effected by means of a keyboard, so that a sound sampler can be played like any other keyboard instrument. Operation The AF output signal of a microphone, tape recorder, or record player is stored and then reproduced. To this end, the signal is transformed into a series of (binary) digits in an analogue-to- digital converter (ADC), after which the digits are stored in a digital random-access memory (RAM) or read-only mem...