The Electronic Sound-House

Welcome to Ian Fritz's electronic music site

We have also our sound-houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds, and their generation. We have harmonies which you do not, of quarter-sounds, and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown ... We have also means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances. — Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (1624)

This web site describes some of the work I've done over the years designing and building electronic music synthesizers and controllers.

After many years of neglect, analog synthesis is once again popular. Some of my newly developed and improved synthesizer modules are presented here, with special emphasis on new types of modules not previously available.

Recently, chaos science has grown into a large and important mathematical and scientific discipline. Chaotic processes combine regular and irregular behavior, analogous in many respects to musical composition. I present here some novel and unique electronic chaos circuits for analog synthesizer applications.

My custom synthesizer system incorporates special modules that are useful for wind controller applications. A "wind controller" is a hybrid instrument that is "played" like a traditional musical wind instrument, but rather than producing musical sounds directly, it produces electrical signals that are used to control electronic-music sound generators.

Two different custom-designed wind controllers are described on these pages — an all-analog design for use with modular analog synthesizers and a MIDI controller for use with various commercial synthesizers and sound modules.

The synthesis technique referred to as "physical modeling" has recently become popular because it effectively simulates the behavior of acoustic instruments. I have included a description of some of my experiments in this fascinating area.