Modular Synthesizers as Conceptual Models
Jonathan De Souza · Focal Press eBooks · 2024
This chapter considers three examples from the 1970s and 80s, where synthesizers supported new conceptual models. The organologist Herbert Heyde imagined all musical instruments in modular terms. He analyzed various acoustic instruments via circuit diagrams, parsing their functional components as oscillators, filters, amplifiers, and so forth. Meanwhile, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari took synthesizers as a model for contemporary philosophy. Yet they also used it to reimagine chromaticism in Western music as a tendency toward continuous variation in all musical parameters. Finally, the media theorist Friedrich Kittler presented Wagnerian music drama as a kind of circuit, another modular system. For Kittler (who once built a modular synthesizer), technologies like the synthesizer helped to reveal the interplay of music and sound, the arts and media, the symbolic and the real. For these thinkers, music emerges from complex systems with both human and technological components, and modular synthesizers stimulate new perspectives on earlier musical practices.