A synthesizer is an electronic device designed to generate audio by non-acoustic means. Synthesizers are the all-important components of today's emerging techno/electronica genres, and have been available in academic music circles since the early 50's. Synthesizers use different techniques to combine basic or sampled waveforms in clever ways to produce interesting and evolving tambres.

A device aimed at producing sounds by sending specifics parameters to an electronical device.
There are different kind of synthesizers around :

• True analog, which is used by most vintage synthesizers such as the Minimoog
• Virtual analog, which is consists of emulating the above. This is the case of a lot of synthesizers, in peculiar, the ones developped by the German company Quasimidi.
• Wavetable synthesis is actually a form of synthesis in which a table of single-cycle waveforms are cycled through to get a dynamic sound than just plain subtractive analog synthesis. Waldorf is one company that manufactures wavetable synths.
• Sample-playback The synthesis that plays back fixed waveforms is also called S+S. It consists of storing fixed waveforms in either ROM or RAM during execution. This is the most popular as most soundcards embed one, nowadays. As at the begining General MIDI only accessed the pitch, velocity and sound bank, it evoluted according to 2 standards :
  • GS (Roland)
  • XG (Yamaha)
  which allow a more living sound to be extracted from a wavetable as tons of others parameters like cutoff, resonance, etc. can now be manipulated through the MIDI channel.
• Frequency Modulation (FM) was used by the famous Yamaha DX7 synthesizer
• Formant Shaping: was the real successor of the above even though it was (IIRC) only used in Yamaha's FS1R synthesizer which production was stopped some time ago. It has very good sound abilities and can clearly imitate a human voice as it simulates the human sound generation (hear the Tompox's Free Software Song Remix on http://Www.tompox.com/mp3/FreeSoftware.mp3 for a demo).
• Specific synthesis. This is used by any synthesizer hacked around some specific unfrequent hardware component. It opens new opportunities in terms of control and sounding. The SidStation was one of these.