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LYRA • 8 USER MANUAL
LYRA'S HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY
I have spent many years exploring the brain and nervous system of the living organism.
One of the things I wanted to understand was how and why a several-hundred-neuron
nervous system in the smallest of insects and the simplest of animals is capable of pro-
ducing the complex and multifaceted behaviour that our most powerful computers still
fail to model today. One of the answers I found is that the brain is an analogue system
with a large number of non-linear, chaotic processes. The brain, as well as the whole
bio-organism, has many loops of positive and negative associations. Like a very complex
see-saw, it's searching for balance while in constant motion. It's this balancing act on the
brink of chaos in a highly non-linear state, that enables an organism and the brain as
part of it, to react to the outside world so effectively and dynamically, and also to create
inner worlds of its own.
This cannot be modelled by a digital machine, because in the process something essential
is lost. In the age of digitalisation we've been consciously deleting all chaos or controversy
from digital chains — which was their very essence. It's what makes even a simple living
organism so effective: its every cell, when you look close enough, turns out to be a highly
complex, virtually endless, unpredictable and open system — a mini-universe, a microcosm.
Analogue electronic circuits give us something similar.
I decided I wanted to apply these concepts to building synthesizers, as synths are a huge
interest of mine — my second love. LYRA's secret isn't the modules as such — they've all
been around for decades. Rather, it's how they connect and interact. LYRA's schematics
aren't linear, unlike classic subtractive synths with blocks in series that gradually pro-
cess the signal. Here, for example, the envelope generator can affect a voice's pitch, or
in some modes change the parameters of FM synthesis or even of the delay when it's
set to self-modulation mode (SELF on + MOD and FB high enough). LYRA is a structure
that reacts to your slightest touch. It's a bizarre animal that twists and turns under your
fingers, rather than a precise mechanism. This is why it's called "organismic".
Another important source for my experience has come from exploring acoustic instru-
ments, such as the violin. And that presented the question: how is it that a musician can
consciously spend a profound lifetime with a piece of wood with four pieces of metal wire
on it, with nothing more than a horse-tailed stick? How is it possible then that a musician
gets bored in a matter of months with the most powerful synthesizer with a thousand
controls? The answer I came to was that the best instruments are those that allow for
the most direct and the most tactile connection between the player's body and the "tone
generator". This gives the musician the most immediate control over the sound and, as
such, the ability to express the aspirations of their soul. This is why we call a violin a "live"
instrument.
Then an insight came: a synthesizer can act similarly if we rebuild the connection once
broken. Just look at how many little machines stand in the way between the tone gener-
ators and the player's body in today's traditional synth: sequencers, quantizers,envelope
generators, LFOs etc. The player, in fact, can't control the sound source as such; they just
choose the algorithm for those machines to use to control the tone generator. From this
standpoint, the perfect "live" synthesizer was the very first of them — the Theremin. Just
one monophonic oscillator and one simple waveform, but it's so connected to the play-
er's movements. And, quite importantly, the Theremin is perhaps the only synth to have
preserved its original structure despite the enormous progress in electronics since the
1920s — which goes to show that the principle once found was absolutely right!