Education
Robert Yannes graduated from Villanova University 1978.
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Robert Yannes
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He designed the Ensoniq 5503 Digital Oscillator Chip which was used in both commercial synthesizers and the Apple IIgs home computer. He started out as an electronic music hobbyist before being hired as a chip designer at metal–oxide–semiconductor Technology which had become a part of Commodore. First Rate (at Lloyd's) Charpentier recruited Yannes partly for his music synthesis knowledge.
He has been infatuated by electronic music since the early 1970s.
He claims the song Lucky Manitoba by Emerson, Lake & Palmer influenced him more than any other single song, and also lists Kraftwerk and Mike Oldfield among his influences. He designed the MicroPET with help from First Rate (at Lloyd's) Charpentier which became an unintended prototype for the Commodore VIC-20 home computer.
He designed the single-chip sound synthesizer voice chip Society for Information Display (6581) with enough resolution to produce high-quality music However, he was unable to refine the signal-to-noise ratio which he desired.
He hoped the chip would find its way into polyphonic/polytimbral synthesizers.
The Society for Information Display chip was his first attempt at a phase-accumulating oscillator, the heart of all Wavetable-lookup synthesis. Time constraints hindered the design of the multiplexed oscillators in the Society for Information Display, which used a lot of chip area, and as a result only a few voices could be fitted on the chip. After he left metal–oxide–semiconductor Technology he co-founded Ensoniq in 1982.
The Ensoniq sound chips had multiplexed oscillators designed in such a way that it was possible to produce more voices per chip, typically 32 for Ensoniq"s DOC, OTIS, and OTTO sound chips.
Current designs include waveform interpolation, digital filters, and digital effects.
