On the theme of enjoyable instruments, this one’s less complicated than it is inscrutable. The Fizmo was the last product to come out of Ensoniq before its parent company, Emu, was absorbed by Creative Labs, the Soundblaster people.¹ Once the company was purchased, all development stopped, so the Fizmo was left with only a partially implemented midi specification. Many of the Fizmo’s parameters can only be changed by sysex messages (not even via the front panel), and many of those are, unfortunately, undocumented.
How bad is it? A bunch of geeks on the internet decided to reverse engineer it to create a modern editor, and they gave up. That’s right: GEEKS ON THE INTERNET GAVE UP.
But you can always edit most of it from the really informative onboard display:
I think it says “no.5”
So despite Richard D. James being all retro-cool with his notoriously difficult Cheetah MS800, I’d prefer to nominate the Fizmo as the Dwarf Fortress of synthesizers.²
So what was cool about the Fizmo? Transwaves.
But first, some math and physics: Sound is how we perceive changes in pressure over time. We can hear these changes over a specific range of about 20Hz (or 20 cycles per second) to 20kHz (20,000 cycles per second.) For example, air that is compressing and decompressing at a rate of 440 cycles per second sounds like the note A, just above the middle C on a piano keyboard.
The sound above is a sine wave, which contains only a single frequency – 440Hz. A spectrum analysis (frequencies present at a single point in time) looks pretty boring:
That spike is right over where 440 would be on the x-axis.
As does a graph of pressure over time:
Yep, that’s roughly two cycles of a sine wave.
What makes the same note sound so different when it’s played on different instruments is actually all of the other frequencies present in that sound. We hear the fundamental (the 440 in this case) as the note that’s being played, but in any sound more complex than a sine wave, there are harmonics (or overtones) present as well.
Here’s a Fender Rhodes Mark I Seventy Three, playing that same note:
It sounds the same, but different. In the first place, it definitely begins, and then changes in volume and timbre over time. It seems similar to the sine wave, but is more complex. How much more? Check out the spectrum analysis:
Lots more frequencies present!
Notice that there’s still a spike around 440, which is what makes us hear it as an A. There’s also a pattern of eight or nine more spikes to the right of 440. They’re actually at specific multiples of 440. The first big one is at 2:1 or 880, the next one is at 3:1 or 1320, the next one is at 4:1 or 1760, etc. There are also lots of other frequencies present, as well as ones beneath the fundamental. The ones beneath 440 represent the resonance of the wood and plastic case of the Rhodes as I hit the key. All of this together makes it sound like a Rhodes.
And a sample of pressure over time?
That’s roughly two cycles of not a sine wave.
So in just that small amount of variability between the sine wave and the slightly more complex wave above, we get all those extra frequencies! A couple of things to notice about the graph above. First, unlike the sine, it crosses the zero point four times before it seems to repeat. The sine wave crosses only twice. Second, the repeat is a slightly different shape. In fact, every single cycle of the Rhodes waveform is slightly different from the last. That means that the relative volumes of different frequencies are changing over time, as well as the overall volume as it fades out. Like this:
So what does this have to do with the Fizmo, again? Oh yeah… transwaves.
Most synthesizers build sounds by manipulating waveforms.³ They do this by combining sine, square, sawtooth, triangle and other complex waves, and then using both filters to remove some of the harmonics, and modulators that can change the waveshape, harmonics, pitch, volume or any number of other things.
One method for generating complex waveforms is to use what’s called a wavetable. Instead of having to use complex math to squish an easily generated sine wave into a Rhodes wave, some synthesizers keep a bunch of pre-calculated single-cycle waves in memory. You just call up the Rhodes wave, and that’s the starting point for your sound.
What the Fizmo did differently was to create a wavetable made up of individual single-cycle waves that were closely related to each other, and could be strung together into a longer, evolving sound. Like this:
What you’re hearing is a slow cruise through the 128 individual single-cycle waveforms that make up one transwave in the Fizmo. Any of these can be played individually, or the Fizmo can skip through them at random, or in time with a song, with the velocity that you press a key, or pretty much any other source of modulation. It can even jump across transwaves, if you like the sound of digital glitching (which I do).
Here’s an example. This is just a single note, held down.
You can hear four different sounds at once, all scanning over the individual cycles in the transwave.
Which means I can add something like this THX-like intro to the fanfare. Remember, this is all single-cycle waveforms. No samples, no orchestra hits, no airplanes.
Maybe.
¹ You don’t want to meet the Soundblaster people at night. Actually, now I really want to know more about the Soundblaster people.
² An analogy that breaks down faster than a thing that breaks down really fast.
³ I’m not really including samplers here. We’ll talk about them later.