ABSTRACT
A key factor in the resurgence of modular synthesizers is the wide acceptance of a de facto standard, the Eurorack format, developed by a German manufacturer in the late 1990s. After World War II, engineering had evolved wildly in several fields, following, alas, the war’s technological investment, with offspring such as control theory and cybernetics. Modular synthesizers have never been very popular, due to their cost, complexity, and incompatibility between different standards. The modular boom was followed by the production of software tools. Although software modularity and patching are found in early computer music software such as Pure Data and Max, several virtual analog modular emulators have been proposed in the years since the inception of virtual analog technology. Native Instruments’ Reaktor is also an alternative software solution for the emulation of modular synthesizers. Despite being a modular software environment since its inception, only with version 6 did it feature Blocks.
