Quotes from Rewired – the Resurgence of Analog Sound Synthesis by Janne Vanhanen (2017).
In the era when synthesizers were introduced into music-making, the immediacy of producing synthesized sounds was appreciated by many composers who were accustomed to the necessity of writing score music. This was especially important for musicians and composers working in the experimental field, as their resources were often limited.
Necessity of handiwork may be more conductive to experimentation musically. With no screen to provide visual input, heavy emphasis on listening is brought upon the work. Constantly adjusting the different oscillators and filters to ‘shape’ the sound transforms the human–synthesizer interface into a likeness of a sculptor working with malleable material, the qualities of which are explored in the process of working and which provide information for future decisions.
Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari even consider analog sound synthesis to be a model for updating Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy […] for Kant the synthetic a priori judgments are of primary importance to us as subjects, as they only can generate new information that is necessarily true by synthesizing different elements […] Deleuze and Guattari consider the synthesizer as the modern a priori synthetic machine capable of holding together heterogeneous elements and, as a necessary addition, to extract a rule of construction for this new synthetic object. […] digital processing of information integrates its contents into homogeneous code and involves calculation instead of critical experimentation with the rules of construction.
The promise of the production of this ‘newness’ is where the visionary dimension of analog sound synthesis ultimately lies.