by Per Vilez

Martin Fay is the creator of the VAZ Modular synthesizer for the Windows. In the following interview Martin talks about the origins, inspiration and possible future developments of VAZ .

What is your background with regards to DSP and music?

I started programming out of curiosity while doing my degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge. I worked on a couple of personal projects while developing Computer Aided Learning materials at UMIST, and started developing the first VAZ a bit over 5 years ago to see if it could be done! I've picked up knowledge of DSP as I've gone along, and having a reasonable level of maths education has been helpful.

My musical background starts with playing trumpet from age 9, doing the grades and moving into big band jazz in my teens. Soon after I moved to work at UMIST I decided to get a synth and start trying to write electronic music, which has continued since with more of an interest in analogue synths. By the time I started on VAZ I had a pretty good idea of what makes analogue synths tick.

The many modules which comprise the VAZ Modular provide the user with some powerful wave creation and manipulation tools. Could you tell us more about the inspiration behind some of these?.

The majority of modules are inspired by various analogue modular synths, others from taking general concepts and putting together a module to see what it would sound like. An example of that is the Granular Osc which is really more of a realtime-timestretch. Just that module with the right source sample is capable of huge range of sound textures.

What current synthesis or audio synthesis, processing developments do you see as exciting areas of exploration?

It can be hard to see much in the way of really new methods of synthesis and processing, probably the only potentially radical development I can think of is the Hartmann neural net based synth. There is still a lot of space to explore combining different structures of known processes though. Such a large fraction of synths simply retread the oscs, filter, amp structure.

Do Vaz users use the system live?

I have had reports of this being done, yes. I don't have very much in the way of details to give you though.

Do you see this system develop on other computer platforms?

We're doing some exploration of other platform options, but there are no firm plans yet.