Nori Ubukata is a Japanese musician living in Lyon, France. He’s a composer, thereminist, and sound designer whose work spans decades of electronic instrument development. One of the original Yamaha DX7 sound designers, he co-created the Shofuku sound cartridges with Yasuhiko Fukuda in 1984 and later revisited those sounds for Arturia’s DX7 V. His explorations of musical expression also led him to develop Thérésyn, an instrument combining the theremin’s gestural control with analog synthesis. His current favorite synths are: Synthmaster, The 80 (virtual version), and the Polybrute 6.
In our conversation with Nori Ubukata, he remembers encountering the Yamaha DX7 at the factory, while the instrument was still becoming the machine musicians would come to know. Asked which sound first convinced him of its possibilities, he recalls the experience as a whole.
“I was a one of the first DX7 sound designers. I saw it in Yamaha factory. Everything was new, everything was interesting.”
When Yamaha released the DX7 in 1983, the company brought a long history of instrument making to an unfamiliar kind of synthesis. Its origins lay in Torakusu Yamaha’s repair of a school reed organ in Hamamatsu in 1887; Nippon Gakki, the company that became Yamaha Corporation, was established in 1897. The business expanded into pianos and, eventually, electronic instruments. By the 1970s, it was also manufacturing integrated circuits for its keyboards and audio equipment. That combination of musical experience and electronics manufacturing would help turn an experimental sound-generation technique into a practical instrument.
The essential discovery behind digital FM synthesis had come in 1967, during composer John Chowning’s experiments at Stanford University. Using computer-generated oscillators, Chowning increased the speed of a vibrato-like modulation until it changed the character of the sound itself. What began as an audible fluctuation in pitch became a way of producing complex timbres. Yamaha subsequently licensed Stanford’s technology and undertook the engineering needed to put it into musical instruments. Its early commercial FM keyboards included the GS1 and GS2 in 1981, followed by the programmable DX7 two years later.
Ubukata’s work belongs to the part of that history in which a technical possibility becomes something a musician can use. An instrument needs sounds that reveal what its circuitry can do, and someone has to discover them. He became a part of the tapestry of patch history that remains relevant. He continues to develop patches across a variety of engines to this day.
DX7 Distinctives
The DX7 offered six operators—sound-generating elements arranged in different configurations called algorithms. Operators acting as carriers contribute to the audible output; modulators change the signals of other operators, shaping their timbre. The architecture invites an analytical approach, but Ubukata describes his early programming in more immediate terms. Asked whether he began with the algorithm’s structure or the response he wanted beneath a player’s fingers, he returns to the development period.
“At the same time with DX7 development. Some other sound designers used some theory, but I didn’t. The instinct, trial and error only.”
There is a historical echo here. Chowning himself described the discovery of digital FM as something he heard before he fully understood its mathematics. Ubukata’s account suggests a similar willingness to let listening direct the next experiment. The engineering made the instrument possible; its musical vocabulary still had to be explored.
One of the DX7’s most instructive features, for Ubukata, was an absence. Asked which programming constraint produced his most surprising discovery, he answers:
“Filterless indeed. This DX feature trained me much.”
On a conventional subtractive synthesizer, a filter removes portions of a harmonically rich sound. FM gives the programmer a different set of relationships to manipulate: the frequencies of the operators, their levels, and the way those levels change over time. A modulator’s envelope can change the evolving tone of a note, while a carrier’s envelope governs its contribution to loudness. Changing the sound at its source becomes central to the work.
Ubukata’s brief answer makes that missing filter sound like a teacher. The instrument required close attention to how its parameters interacted. Yet his later comments suggest that he felt no obligation to preserve those restrictions once other tools became available.
Yamaha’s subsequent instruments opened several paths beyond the original DX7. The SY77, released in 1989, combined advanced FM with sample-based synthesis and digital filtering. The company also pursued physical modeling, which simulates the behavior of sound-producing systems; that research reached an instrument in the VL1 in 1993. These developments gave sound designers different ways to approach both timbre and expression.
Ubukata says, “Physical modeling synths are another world. PCM+FM like the SY series are quite interesting. Thanks to the filter, I didn’t have to be so careful on the FM parameters.”
The filter’s return changed his working conditions. After learning to shape sounds within the DX7’s particular demands, he could use an additional stage of control to arrive at the result he wanted.
His response to a later generation of FM is even more succinct.
“If you meant FM synthesis of KORG OP6, It was effortless.”
Korg’s opsix extends the six-operator idea with additional ways for operators to process sound, including ring modulation, filtering, and wavefolding. Its design illustrates how far the surrounding tools can change while retaining FM as a foundation. Ubukata offers no detailed explanation of what made it effortless for him, but the assessment is striking beside his recollection of learning through trial and error at Yamaha.
The opportunity to revisit his own earlier sounds brought that relationship between experience and expanded tools into sharper focus. In 1984, Ubukata and Yasuhiko Fukuda created the Shofuku expansion cartridges for the DX7. Decades later, Arturia brought those sounds to its DX7 V software instrument and invited Ubukata to revisit them.
“Well, they planned to reissue Shofuku and asked me to refine it with the new features. According to the new feature, all original patches of Shofuku had been polished maximumly. I’m so proud on the quality.”
Arturia’s instrument adds capabilities unavailable on the original hardware, including additional operator waveforms, filters, expanded envelopes, and effects. Ubukata does not single out a particular patch or category as the chief beneficiary. His answer treats the collection as a whole: earlier work that could be developed further when the instrument’s possibilities expanded.
What is the Thérésyn?
That interest in expanding an instrument’s possibilities also informs Thérésyn, his project combining theremin performance with analog synthesis. It takes his story back to an earlier chapter in electronic music, before programmable keyboards and digital sound generation.
Invented by Russian physicist and musician Lev Sergeyevich Termen, known as Léon Theremin, in 1920, the theremin was among the earliest electronic musical instruments. Its player controls pitch and volume by moving their hands near two antennas, without touching the instrument. RCA began producing theremins in the United States in 1929, bringing this unusual relationship between gesture and sound into the home-instrument market. Its cost and the difficulty of playing accurately limited its wider adoption.
The theremin made the performer’s movement an unusually visible part of electronic music. Thérésyn builds on that relationship while expanding the available sounds and ways of articulating them. The project’s exhibition description identifies a pressure-sensitive touch pad among its additions to traditional theremin control.
“Thérésyn has so many possibilities. I designed that to make theremin free from the birdcage.”
Ubukata follows that image with a description of the choices he wants players to have.
“You can mix original theremin sound and VOC waveforms together, even white noise. Theremin and VCO can run with the different pitch scale. Envelope generator is also available…I hope people to find their original musical possibility with Thérésyn.”
His reference to an envelope generator connects this project with a concern that runs through synthesis: how a sound begins, changes, and ends. Across these instruments, the design of the tone and the means of performing it remain closely related. In Ubukata’s account, the possibilities matter because a player might discover a personal use for them.
There is also the question of who can gain access to those possibilities. Asked about his next project, he describes a planned instrument called Therewaves.
“I’m planning to produce a simplified Thérésyn called Therewaves. Thérésyn is kinda expensive luxury instrument, but Therewaves is more familiar for every theremin player. Structure wise, financial wise—both”
The ambition has a precedent in the histories surrounding his work. Yamaha’s development of FM carried an experimental technique into instruments that reached a much wider musical public. The theremin’s early commercial history showed how price and the demands of performance could limit an invention’s audience. Ubukata now identifies both complexity and cost as concerns for his own design.
From the unfamiliar DX7 at the Yamaha factory to the planned Therewaves, his answers trace a continuing interest in what musicians might discover when an instrument gives them room to experiment. The sound designer who learned through instinct, trial, and error wants to make that opportunity available to the next player.
