Peter Edwards
The Open Modular Synthesizer or OMS is a new standard of electronic musical synthesizer design which celebrates the intuitive physicality of analog synthesis, the expansive potential of modern digital methods and the inventive power of open, crowd sourced media.
I have been working on OMS over the past year as a masters student at the Institute of Sonology and at STEIM in The Netherlands as a member of the Instruments & Interfaces Masters program.
This project is based on more than 10 years of experience building electronic musical instruments for a living and sharing my plans and other DIY info with the maker community as well as countless collaborations with other musicians and engineers around the world.
My primary goal is to give hobbiests and pros alike the tools they need to start building synthesizers and start making music. This is achieved by standardizing rote operations and by opening the design process to the public through a highly organized interactive database.
OMS will be realized online as a free, open and interactive resource of synthesizer modules designed around a small set of laws and suggestions. These constraints give individuals a foundation of standards which are flexible enough to evolve as the project grows but defined enough to allow discreet ideas to be modularly interconnected down the road.
I am currently researching design approaches taken by other synth designers and assembling a list of laws and suggestions. It is vital at this stage to meet with other artists and engineers and open source enthusiasts to share ideas.
For this reason I see Piksel as an ideal venue to present my work and gain critical feedback.
