Agreed. It's nice that the TFA is celebrating the DX7 because it was absolutely a seminal synth but it's a pretty uninformed take on FM synthesis. Depending on

Agreed. It's nice that the TFA is celebrating the DX7 because it was absolutely a seminal synth but it's a pretty uninformed take on FM synthesis. Depending on how you count there's really only a handful of fundamental synthesis approaches used for musical tone generation (subtractive, additive, granular, wavetable and frequency modulation). Most synthesizers being made today just use evolved forms and combinations of these basic techniques. As you said, FM synthesis is one of those fundamental building blocks and it didn't go away. Instead, it went pretty much everywhere - including into the ringtone chips in the vast majority of mobile phones of the early 2000s. Just last month I got a cheap RF doorbell chime for $3 from AliExpress with a dozen different selectable tones and they all have that distinctive FM sound. I was a little surprised that even today FM synthesis remains a cheaper way to generate complex tones than sampled waveforms. The article didn't even explore the fascinating development of FM synthesis which made an unlikely leap from esoteric academic research at Stanford to an incredibly successful product that had global pop culture impact. https://usa.yamaha.com/products/contents/music_production/synth_50th/history/chapter002.html https://usa.yamaha.com/products/contents/music_production/sy...