Synthesis Technology E950 Circuit Bent VCO

The E950 is a DSP-based VCO that combines the famous “smooth morphing” of the E350 Morphing Terrarium with Texas Instruments’ fully licensed LPS speech synthesis technology.

It has both ROM banks of speech data as well as two banks of Morphin Terrarium’s wavetables and it’s bending algorithms emulate a circuit bent speech toy for children.

The E950 has 4 banks of speech ROM data, which is provided by Texas Instruments under an exclusive license agreement. The E950 then applies proprietary ‘bending’ algorithms to behave exactly as a circuit bent original unit and then extends them to real-time modulation of the internal lattice filter coefficients, something that cannot be done normally.

What this means: the E350 can be used both in normal and “bent” mode, even under voltage control! Unlike circuit bent machines and keyboards, the module is very repeatable and controllable.
Easily the E950 crosses the boundary between traditional wavetable VCOs and the unique possibilities using hundreds of words, phrases and glitches.

The MOST IMPORTANT thing to realize is that it REQUIRES a Gate/Trigger to speak

For license reasons we are not allowed to write the original device’s name, but you probably can imagine what it is – a red toy with a green display and handle, which was used to practice spelling words by entering them on a keyboard. It is very popular with the circuit bending community and this fact led to the design of the E950 module.

Let’s quote Paul Schreiber of Synthesis Technology:
“The name ‘Synthesis Technology’ refers to my work I did with Texas Instruments from 1984-1991 building FPGA-based LPC speech engines and post-processing DSP cards for the TMS50C10 and 50C30 family of speech processors. I just kept the name for when I started MOTM modules in 1997 :)”