Electronic music - musical terms

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Musical side

These are generic musical terms (of which there are many more).

And roughly the subset seen implemented on synths.

Arpeggio

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Arpeggio is the concept of breaking a chord into notes in quick succession, often specifically one ordered by increasing or decreasing tone.

You may associate (particularly slower) arpeggiation with seventies and eighties synth sounds, because arpeggiation was both a way to get chord-like things out of often-monophonic synths, as well as an easy way to something that functions like a bassline.

Wider than that, it can be an intentional technique in composition.

Vibrato

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Vibrato is a regular variation in pitch.

Tends to be a small and fast change.

Used in singing, and in various instruments, often for a fuller sound, a more emotive sound, for a spacier sound, for more permissive pitch perception, etc.

From a synthesis perspective, it's frequency modulation with a small amplitude (typically less than a semitone) and fairly slow(-for-FM) carrier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrato

Tremolo

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

A trembling effect.

This can come either from

• very rapid repetition of a note

sometimes for the perception of it being played longer

sometimes for the texture that the variation in volume gives

• a (often fast) variation in volume.

Sometimes confused with vibrato, which makes sense in that on various instruments (and e.g. a Leslie speaker) the two come hand in hand, due to physics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tremolo

Sostenuto

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

A three-pedal piano will often (details actually vary [1]) have those pedals be

• soft
• sostenuto
• sustain

Where sustain disengages all the string's dampers allowing free resonance until the pedal is released, sostenuto is more selective: holds away the dampers of the notes that were held when the pedal is pressed, until that pedal is released.

With some well-timed foot movement this allows you to e.g. sustain the chords, while the melody is moving quickly without sustain. The faster the piece, the harder this is to do, because you should not be playing any melody the moment you play the chord to which the sostenuto should apply.

For context, the soft pedal is actually not about the dampeners.

If you've ever seen a piano open you'll have noticed that every note has multiple strings. The details vary per model, but it's often three, lowering to two or one for bass notes. There are multiple reasons for that, but the one we care about here is loudness - and this is relevant to why the piano's full name at the time was piano-forte.

The soft pedal shifts the entire keyboard so that the hammer hits fewer of these strings, which is also why it can apply to specific played notes without further mechanisms.

Dynamics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamics_(music)

Ornament

Ornaments are notes, or other things playing with pitch, that are not necessary to the melody, harmony, or rhythm (in the analytical sense), but still add to the piece as a form of decoration.

May be improvised, may be marked, or marked with some interpretation on how to play)

Technical side

-phony and -timbrality

monophonic means a single voice.

On toy keyboards this may mean a single fixed sound. Press a second key and it will be playing just one (it varies with design whether that's the old one, the newly pressed key, the highest of the notes, etc.).

Monophonic can e.g. be quite enough for things like basslines.

For support or melodies with a little more interesting complexity, you could have two oscillators at a fixed pitch distance (e.g. 'chord mode', suboscillators, and chorus implemented this way) is technically still monophonic, though couldbe called paraphonic at a stretch.

Polyphonic means multiple independent voices, in that they have their own pitch.

And usually also their own filters, envelopes and such.

In theory you can have one per key, but doing so in analog hardware was expensive, prone to error, and pretty unnecessary given the typical number of fingers playing, so it was more typical to have a fixed, lowish number.

E.g. if it has six voices, it would route six keypresses to them and pressing a seventh would do nothing (or cut out one of the previously playing ones).

Most keyboards over time were only moderately polyphonic.

As far as I know, there isn't even a name for "yes you can press all keys at once", but that does exist, in ways. An interesting one is the Mellotron[2][3], sort of a forerunner to synths, having one piece of magnetic tape and tape head for each key.

paraphonic

refers to any variant between strictly monophonic and polyphonic.

usually means some later parts of the soundpath are shared, but some early part is not.

for example, if there are two independently pitched oscillators, behind just one envelope and filter, that's paraphony.

you could call this a paraphonic monosynth

what is often called duophonic is frequently actually paraphony this way (two-oscillator paraphony)

the word duophonic and even polyphonic have been abused since the early synths

Independent is the synth's timbrality

Monotimbral means one timbre (if polyphonic: per key).

multi-timbral usually means distinct voices that are producing different timbres, and/or allowing playing distinct expression into different voices.

This allows nice layering - with things at the same pitch

or: have multiple voices but all get the same treatment(verify).

This is where you can get into semantics and and

consider multi-timbral as halfway towards polyphonic,

ask whether monophonic is necessarily monotimbral (because only one voice to control),

answer - depends a little on what you count towards timbre

Velocity could in theory be used to get a paraphonic synth to mix two timbres,

but in reality it's mostly just used for loudness, so that would be a stretch.

polyphonic could be used to get something multitimbral

but on many keyboards you actually can't, because the polyphony is specifically there only to allow multiple keys to produce distinctly pitched instances of the same timbre, not to also have them have different timbre (but there are probably exceptions)

Still, multitimbrality can be quite close to polyphony.

Particularly in the "things that give you more interesting sounds" way.

Examples:

• The MS20, even though it has two oscillators that you can combine for varied textures, pitched the same when played from the keyboard, so is basically monophonic.

And basically monotimbral because even though you can tweak its two oscillators independently, it gets expressed the same and perceived as one sound - even if that's a chord

...and I picked it as an example because there are some patches [4] that do give limited paraphony (by abusing sample and hold).

One example of where the distinction matters is the Roli Seaboard, a controller that can be set to send the expression of individual touches onto distinct MIDI channels (partly for MIDI-specific reasons; it e.g. means things that listen to channel CC, or channel aftertouch rather than key aftertouch, can still be controlled individually).

https://en.audiofanzine.com/sound-synthesis/editorial/articles/polyphony-paraphony-and-multitimbrality.html