Wavestation

Around 1988 when was I was endorsing Casio, I tried to sell them on the idea of developing a synthesizer based on granular synthesis. I wanted to codevelop it, because that had been my specialty when I studied computer music at Princeton, and I thought this could lead to a breakthrough in the technology of practical sound generation and analysis. It didn’t fit into their plans at the time, so the idea was not persued, but I remember telling them that I thought the idea was in the air and if we didn’t do it, someone else would. Sure enough, the following year, Korg released the Wavestation--the first performance-based, dedicated hardware synthesizer based on granular synthsis.

The Korg Wavestation is really one of my favorite synths. It has a feature called “wave sequences” that can be set up to do a form of granular synthesis. A wave sequence is a series of sounds that play in a particular order and with controllable durations. In many of the factory patches, you can hear these sounds used to play grooves--cycling ostinatos that can be trigger by one key. But this is not what I’m talking about. If you speed the wavesequences up fast enough, they blend into complex time-varying timbres. At this point, you hear the wavesequence as a tone rather than as groove. You don’t hear the parts that make it up, just the whole sound as one.

Here, in a nutshell is why I think granular synthesis is cool.

This wave-particle duality is already familar from the study of light. Light can be either thought of as waves or as particles, depending on what experiment you do.

Well it turns out that it is the same with sounds. This was proved mathematically by Gabor in 1947. So if conventional acoustic theory is based on waves, then so far we have been dealing with HALF THE STORY. Granular analysis and synthesis completes the picture.

I know at one point the Wavestation was the new synth in town, but I’m not sure how long it held onto that position. I suspect that sound programmers in general didn’t fully appreciate the possiblities of granular synthesis, so not enough killer sounds were created. And anyway, this implementation of granular synthesis has some practical limitations, and cannot do all of the types of things discussed in the literature, so I certainly would not call the Wavestation the last word on this method. For future developments, I would think that the Wavelet Transform would be a good mathematical foundation for a future implementation of this idea.

I don’t know if Korg still makes the Wavestation, but I know it was discontinued in the United States. I heard a rumor that this was because the U.S. was placing limits on imports from Japan, so product lines had to be trimmed. So much for protectionism.

Then again, maybe this will inspire me to seek another development partner and take this idea to the next level.