Signals and Sound: Building an Analog Synthesizer

Continuous signals form the foundation of much of modern electrical engineering, long before anything becomes digital. Old-school analog synthesizers generate sound using electronic circuits that create and shape electrical signals. But how do a handful of components turn simple waveforms into something we can hear? In this semilab we will build and analyze these circuits ourselves. We will design and test systems that generate and shape waveforms, assembling a complete signal chain using oscillators, filters, amplifiers, and envelope circuits to produce and control tones. By measuring signals and experimenting with different circuit designs, we will explore how frequency and filtering affect what we hear and how circuits transform waveforms. Along the way, we will build intuition for the core ideas behind signal processing while constructing a working single-tone synthesizer.