Soma Laboratory Lyra-8

Designed in 2016 by Vlad Kreimer, former radio engineer and a musician from Ukraine/Russia and founder of Soma, the Lyra-8, is an "organismic synthesizer". According to its creator, the term "organismic" implies that the Lyra "uses some principles that lie in the base of living organisms. The way how LYRA’s modules interacting between each other and the behaviour of the instrument resembles a live conversation." It's probably the brand's most popular instrument and has been used countless of times, notably in ambient or drone music compositions or improvisations.

The Lyra-8 is based on eight generators divided into four pairs. They are referred to as "voices" and not VCO's because their design does not follow the classical structure of subtractive synthesis. Instead of a linear or logarithmic dependency on control voltage, the voices and the way they are combined resemble the tone generators in old electric organs. Lyra uses non-linearity a lot, and the voices are constructed in such a way that allows for non-linearity to express itself through "organ-like" addition or FM combination. To complete this modular ensemble of voices, the Lyra-8 includes a delay and distorsion sections as well as a complex low-frequency generator, the "Hyper LFO". It is said to be complex in the sense that its final waveform results from a combination of two simple LFO's that are summed or multiplied by each other.