Understand How an Oscillator Functions in a Homemade Synthesizer

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Lorin Park with Expert Village, and we're talking about building an analog synthesizer from scratch. Not necessarily the easiest undertaking if you think about everything at once, but if you condense it down to its simplest most fundamental ideas, it's really not that hard. What you have to think about though, is that at the heart of any synthesizer is the oscillator, that's what makes sound. Sound is a wave that travels through space, displaces air molecules, but also, in electronics, it's a wave that moves electrons and those electrons then cause our speaker to vibrate. In order to get those electrons moving, we need to have an oscillator circuit. Oscillator describes that it's simply oscillating, moving back and force, that is, that is turns on, turns off, turns on, turns off, lots of power, little bit of power, lots of power, a little bit of power, and we end up creating that fluctuation from low to high that is an audio wave. Simply, an oscillator is a type of an amplifier that's fed back onto itself. The easiest oscillator to create, but probably the most annoying, would be to take a microphone and point it at a speaker. That piercing tone that you hear from the feedback is actually oscillation. However if we use circuitry to "tune" that oscillation, we can create more pleasant tones, and then later we can combine them and create ourselves a synthesizer.

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