Electronic musical instruments design: what's inside counts

By Kevin Kai-Wen Liu, Faraday Technology (October 4, 2024)

Digital electronics has profoundly changed musical instrument design. From toy keyboards to performance-grade pianos, synthesizers, and drum sets, to name a few, instruments that once would have been finely crafted wood and metal can today find their voices in CPUs, memory, and data converters.

This does not mean craftsmanship is dead. There is as much skill, experience, and love of music in the intellectual property (IP) inside today’s electronic instruments as in the workshop of a traditional piano maker or luthier. It is just expressed differently. A look inside an instrument will illustrate this point.

A generic architecture

A concert grand piano, an early analog synthesizer, a drum set, and a clarinet could hardly look less alike. Yet, functionally, the digital electronic versions of all these instruments can share a single block diagram and signal flow. Figure 1 displays the block diagram of an ASIC inside electronic musical instruments.

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