Description | Welcome to the sonic wilderness that is The Voice of Saturn Synth. It is noisy, non-linear, explosive, and unpredictable, not unlike the mighty Sun Ra and his Arkestra (from which our namesake drew inspiration).
The Voice of Saturn Synthesizer was the first device I created that bears the Voice of Saturn name. It came out of my own experimentation with the venerable 555 timer IC and was the result of some circuit bending of some known schematic ideas, the basis of which being the Atari Punk Console.
The core of the synth consists of three oscillators that are loosely based on a circuit-bent version of the Atari Punk Console. The OSC1, OSC2, and an LFO (Low Frequency Oscillator) Modulation: OSC1 produces a simple square wave tone, the pulsewidth of which is modulated with OSC2, and then amplitude modulated with the LFO oscillator.
The circuit-bent nature of the VOS also introduces several unexpected interactions: OSC1 can affect the LFO, and the LFO in some configurations will affect OSC1 even when “off.” This is the chaos that makes the VOS an interesting world to explore. Space: Just as there is vast emptiness in space, the VOS has many regions of silence, but don’t be dismayed; knob settings that produce silence in some combinations yield more interesting sound in others. Keep exploring. |
