[sdiy] ML / AI for music & synthesis (not coding!)

[mskala at northcoastsynthesis.com]

On Sat, 25 Apr 2026, Pete Hartman via Synth-diy wrote:

> Still probably not quite what Eric was meaning, I don't think, but my point
> is that  these are tools that can be used without them turning into a black
> box.  It's about how you engage with them.

I think there's a lot of room for cross-pollination between ML and synth
electronics in particular.  For instance, the way the Gilbert sine shaper
circuit works is pretty much exactly that it's a hardware implementation
of the "softmax" function often used on the output of neural networks.
Normalized sum of exponentials.  Someone who understands either of those
things well will find the other one much less mysterious and scary after
seeing that they're really the same thing.  And the "state space models"
that inspire Mamba, and a few steps later the very recent Qwen3.6, look a
lot like our state variable filters suitably generalized.

-- 
Matthew Skala
North Coast Synthesis Ltd.