Development of a Low-cost Hybrid Music Synthesizer

Until recently, affordable music equipment has always been seen as “budget”, providing a poor user experience. Inexpensive equipment was plagued with audible noise, signal integrity issues, and convoluted user interfaces. Companies like Teenage Engineering have proven that this does not have to be the case, in 2019 introducing their Pocket Operator” series for $89. Due to the modern availability of low cost, high quality, consumer off the shelf [COTS] analog and digital components as well as creative engineering, the quality of inexpensive audio equipment has increased significantly. Despite these industry advances, the market is relatively small and shows a great potential for growth. This senior project capitalizes on this market possibility, providing a low-cost analog/ digital hybrid synthesizer architecture without the aforementioned caveats of poor signal integrity, user interface and sound quality. The synthesizer provides a low latency, simple to use, visual interface to the user. This visual interface allows intuitive and simple-to-learn access to the synthesizer’s parameters. The value of these parameters can also be loaded or saved from non-volatile memory. The power will be provided locally by a battery. Therefore, the synthesizer’s power draw will be low enough to ensure a significant on-time. Physically, the synthesizer provides industry standard audio connectivity to be interfaced with the end user’s existing equipment