Subtractive Synthesis: noise and digital (un)creativity

Subtractive synthesis is a technique of analog and digital electronic sound production that “consists of submitting a spectrally rich wave to a specific type of filtering, thus arriving at the desired tone by eliminating unwanted elements rather than by assembling wanted ones.” I describe a source/filter model as a metaphor for musical creativity where, analogous to white noise, the source is an acoustic totality. Touching upon the history of 20th-century recorded media and digital information, as well as 21st-century music information retrieval, I hope to trace a narrative of subtractive synthesis as artistic process, complemented by musical examples pointing in possible future directions.