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

wmf

This guy should have invented file permissions.

franky47

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.

ahartmetz

The first surprise for me is that it wasn't invented in Japan, which I just assumed because all the best-known FM chips and synthesizers are from Japan.

bradishungry

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!

8bitsrule

Good to see & hear Chowning talk about the origins! The DX-7's lack of patch-cord 'programming' ...replaced by 32 instantly-selectable, well-conceived preset patches in RAM ... was essential in 'democratizing' synthesis. Because it wasn't easy to make new patches, it also jump-started the patch-creation business. The 16-note polyphony also didn't hurt. " in 1986, it was used in 40% of the number-one singles on the US Billboard Hot 100." -- Wikipedia

stefanwebb

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

hananova

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.