A closer look at Proteo develop
HOW WE GOT THERE?
We started working on Proteo almost four years ago after discovering Daphne Oram's incredible Oramics, or, at least what we tougth it was.
To be honest, we initially misunderstood its mechanism and we could also say that Proteo is the child of some kind of translating error, which we think it's a cool thing on its own anyway.
Indeed, we initially thought she was drawing the actual waveforms on some celluloid film but, in reality, she was "just" modulating some oscillators by exposing a number of photocells with different "shading patterns" (which is still incredibile for 1957)
Anyway, we always loved the idea of a synthesizer where you can draw the waveforms and that's why we dropped the Oramics thing and went on with our own way.
Basically the concept was a shapeshifter oscillator that , by default, has no sound at all and creates waveforms by acquiring external signals in real time from its preamps.
At the beginning, we designed Thererec and Proteo as a single module, both the drawing and the sampling parts all together in the same module.
Then we realized it was even cooler to split it in two dedicated units and that's how we came out with the two modules.
Anyway, what we didn't want, was to assimilate Proteo to a sampler or a wavetable oscillator, we didn't want something where you create your own palette of sounds, save it in a memory slot and recall it as a preset.
What we liked most was to explore the concept of mangling a waveform inside the time domain and threat it like you threat a micro loop on a reel tape.
You can take a bigger "window" by recording longer fragments at slower speeds or maybe just capture a small detail by recording it at faster speeds etc etc.
In Proteo, this is the basic mechanism that forms the "wavetable".
But, while in an analogue domain this is a very laborious process, inside the digital domain this could be seamlessly done in continuous. And that's where the cool things start to happen!
As we quickly discovered, with this process it was quite easy to create a lot of nasty sounds with a huge load of evolving harmonics.
We decided then to add the MORPH control, which can blend the captured waveform with a sinewave.
In this way the fundamental harmonic can be still heard trough.
Going a bit nerdy on the tech stuff, instead, we would like to say something on the engine we had to develop for it.
As big fans of analogue old school oscillators, a lot of trials have been made to make Proteo match that quality of sound.
With the classic fixed sample rate architecture, no matter how high it was, a lot of the captured harmonic content got lost due to spectrum limits.
A lot of filtering was needed to avoid artifacts like aliasing, and, in the end, it was always dull and lifeless.
We didn't like how it sounded so we focused more on other projects.
Speaking about “drawing waveform”, in the following years we also considered the idea of making something “easier” in the old fashioned analog way:
something like a reproduction of the mighty Buchla 132.
This idea did excite us but at the end we really wanted the flexibility of the digital domain to give it some new functions and the ability of actually drawing waves.
For a long period an early prototype of PROTEO laid around the lab unused.
Things changed when we tried another digital “reproduction” method (which is quite obsolete in 2023) called "variable sample rate".
With this method you're not sampling a variable quantity of points inside of a certain wavetable, but you are, actually playing all of them at different speeds by changing the clock rate of the internal microprocessor.
This is a lot more closer to what happens when mangling a loop in the analogue domain, and most important, there's virtually the same resolution at every speed, with no loss of details on the high spectrum and no aliasing at all!
Finally we had the sound quality we was aiming for!
As a side note, we didn't invent this but this is the same process used on early wavetable synthesizer like PPG WAVE, SYNCLAVIER , EMU just to name a few and this is also very similar to how old EEPROM based drum machines worked too! (Linn Drum, Obhereim DMX, Roland 909...)