Re. the 2-note sax thing, that must be what I heard, then? I thought there was some technique involving ‘biting down’ & splitting the reed, at least that’s how I heard it described by the saxophonist I watched do it…still didn’t seem musically useful in a conventional setting? Thanks for the followup, Dr.Floyd!
Correcting my own mistake: John Allen developed the Notebender, Dr. Moog & Dr. Rhea came up with the Multiple-Touch Keyboard (a la Animoog, right?), interesting article by Joe Paradiso/MIT: http://web.media.mit.edu/~joep/SpectrumWeb/SpectrumX.html
Vince, I would imagine that you saw multiphonics. Biting and splitting are popular descriptions, although players are not literally biting and splitting. The reed is vibrating at two or three different rates to generate the overtones, so it’s described as splitting, and you have to adjust the pressure on the reed with your lower lip which is referred to as biting.
You can also throat sing and play wind instruments simultaneously which does give you two independent tones and some control, like Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson on flute, but it also changes the basic tone of the instrument which is what people really spend years developing.
I have gotten split tones from my tenor before. It is not musical, it is not really controllable, but it IS an instance of a monophonic instrument playing more than one note at a time.
Long Live Sonny Rollins!
So how about a work-around for a poly then?
So the solution for voice cutoff would be that once a voice is generated, it could be sustained in a different circuit (like a digital delay or sustainer) and you could disengage the original voice and it would still sustain.
So you program your sound, play the maximum of notes the synth will generate, and while you lift your hand up, those notes will sustain while you engage another set of 8 voices. Like a digital damper pedal. A phrase sampler persay. Divide the keyboard into 4 parts, and you can have one sampler per part, so you could have a synth that generated 8 voices, but had the ability to simulate a fully polyphonic instrument.
Well EricK, I guess you define “note” differently than I.
A split tone is the fundamental note you are fingering plus a crazed harmonic caused by tweaking the reed and fingering, but still one sound source. As mentioned, it is not even like playing a note on a monophonic synthesizer and tuning the second oscillator to an interval, because at least there you can control aspects of the second osc. musically. But you are playing one note and hearing two tones, not polyphonically playing two notes.
I was being facetious, I never said it was polyphonic. Frequency, pitch, tone, whatever you want to call it, it’s the exact same thing. It doesn’t matter if theres one sound source, there are distinct pitches playing simultaneously.
Apart from “only” having 8 voices, the 8-Voice comes the closest to giving the synthesist what the synthesist should want in regard to polyphonic synthesis. Of course, it’s also one of the most expensive non-modular synths ever made.
