tl;dr: these form two parallel tracks in an imaginary self-study course: Practice and Performance of Synths, and Implementation of Synthesized Sound.<p>Even if you&#x27;re trying hard to be avant garde and break new sonic ground or whatever, it&#x27;s hard to imagine that you won&#x27;t have some significant overlap with the problems addressed by synth builders to date.  That background will also be useful when trying to understand everything from published papers to existing synths built in pretty much any existing way, from analogue modular, to &quot;rack-style&quot; digital like Logic and Reason, to programmatic work in Max, Pure Data, SuperCollider, or even direct-coded in a traditional programming language, etc.