The Wikipedia entry for paraphony states that a paraphonic synth’s voices fall short of true polyphony “since they share at least one common element”.
#Define polyphonic series#
Each oscillator is controlled by its own sequencer, and you have independent control over glide rate, gate length and pattern behaviour.”įor deeper reading, ’s Glossary, backs this up, and there’s a reference to paraphony in this article from Gordon Reid’s epic Synth Secrets series in Sound On Sound. “Circuit Mono Station is a paraphonic monosynth: it has independently controllable oscillators but just one voice architecture. Novation’s Paul Whittington confirms this: But there’s only one amplitude envelope and filter through which they can be routed, so they aren’t truly independent voices - just independent oscillators.” In this case, you can independently control the pitch of two oscillators at once, via the Circuit Mono Station’s sequencer. “Synths that have separately controllable oscillators, routed through a common voice architecture (filter/amplitude) are generally called paraphonic.
In Create Digital Music’s first write-up of Circuit Mono Station, Peter Kirn closes the piece with a precise definition of the term: with Osc1 tuned to ‘0’ and Osc2 tuned to +5, you will hear the fifth interval above every key you play.) But despite this ability to play two different pitches, they can’t be individually played or sequenced. For example, in the case of Bass Station II, a monosynth, there are two oscillators that can create a dual-tone voice, where the pitches of the oscillators move by the same amount in relation to the key played.
Oscillators are the raw tone generators that create the waveforms at the very start of the synthesis process, and they can usually be tuned independently, normally using semitones and cents for coarse and fine tuning respectively. (This definition of the ‘voice architecture’ is very important, as you’ll discover.)Īdditional complexity arises when you look at the number of oscillators in each voice. A voice is an oscillator or a group of oscillators with an independent filter, amplifier, and/or and amp envelope. The best known and easiest-to-understand terms in this realm are ‘monophonic’ and ‘polyphonic’, which describe a synth’s ability to play just one voice (monophonic) or multiple voices (polyphonic) at once. But these words play a vital role in distinguishing one type of ‘thing’ from another, so it should come as no surprise that the complicated world of synthesis has plenty of advanced vocab.Īnd so we turn to the topic of this piece: the sub-section of phraseology that refers to the number of sounds a synth is capable of creating at any one time.
From semi-parametric EQs and half-normalled patchbays to transformer-isolated DI boxes and back-electret microphones, the jargon that bombards us in the studio can be overwhelming. Music makers are no strangers to complex terminology. In this article, the makers of Circuit Mono Station join forces with Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music to discuss the paraphony puzzle. But by embracing ‘paraphony’, we entered a sometimes confusing sub-section of synthesis categorisation. Novation’s Circuit Mono Station is by no means the first paraphonic synth.
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