
M
odulation means a lot of things to musicians. If you change the key in the middle of
a song (a common musical theater trick), you’ll have modulated the key. If you’re
playing drums and suddenly shift to half-time— ta-da! You’ve performed a metric
modulation. To make matters more confusing, there’s a third musical meaning for this
term that has absolutely nothing to do with the first two.
In electronics-ese, modulate means “change a property of a sound.” Whenever you
twist a potentiometer on a filter, you’r ...