TWO BASIC IDEAS ARE INVOLVED in all electronic music synthesizers.
THE FIRST is that ACOUSTICAL WAVEFORMS CAN BE GENERATED AND MODIFIED PURELY BY ELECTRONIC MEANS.
Banging on a garbage can lid generates a horrible racket by mechanical means. The racket is a very complicated sound; but no matter how complicated it gets, it can be reproduced by a single long and complicated wiggle in a phonograph record. So can a symphony. From a certain point of view all the sounds you’ve ever heard, ever will hear, and ever could imagine, must be reducible to one (or at most two—one for each ear) complicated wiggle of your eardrums.
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THE SECOND BASIC IDEA on which electronic synthesis is based is that WAVE-GENERATING and WAVE-MODIFYING equipment MAY BE CONTROLLED ELECTRONICALLY.
ARP Synthesizer Series 2600 Owner’s Manual, Tonus, Inc., 1971, pg 2, 15.