Intuitive way to understand the concepts and terms behind (subtractive) synthesis: Your mouth and vocal tract!
Open your mouth in a 'neutral' position and make a sound. That's an oscillator. Tensing your throat will change the waveform (on a synth that would be square, pulse, sawtooth).
Purse and widen your lips, make a 'wow' sound: that's a low-pass filter (which cuts off higher sound frequencies).
Make a 'shhh' sound: white noise. Purse your lips, make it sound like wind blowing: band-pass filter (which only lets certain frequencies through).
Turn that wind noise into a whistle: now you're adding filter resonance. As that noise becomes a pure tone, the filter becomes self-oscillating.
Add some vibrato to your sound (like an opera singer), or change the pitch (like a siren), and you're adding modulation.
Doing this in a room, or large hall: now you're changing the reverb (reverberation). In a canyon with echoes: delay.
Often, this is also a useful method to work out how to program a subtle or complicated patch (a sound preset on a synth, so named because early modular synths used telephone patch cables to make the necessary connections).
Aside: I've often wondered what a human choir, making 'synthy' sounds, would be able to do with something like Jarre's classic Oxygène IV...
But how to end up with actual music/a melody doing this? Do you manipulate the sound live? Do you record different samples, made that way, and stick them together with a sequencer? Or do you switch between different, predefined, patches on the fly to kinda "play" it like an instrument?
Sorry if these questions are basic, but this has always fascinated me with synth music: Creating beautiful melodies out of something that starts out pretty much just as "noise", it's kinda like magic.
There are tons of different workflows to create electronic music. You can record sounds (and different instruments) linearly in layers. You can play a single keyboard set up in some clever way that allows you to trigger and control multiple virtual instruments at once (often with the help of arpeggiators or something like KARMA). You can use a looper. You can set up a step sequencer that plays notes in a loop while you manipulate both sounds and melody in some way in real-time. You can set up some gear to procedurally trigger sounds, which is what modular racks are often used for (look up "krell patch"). Or you can do several of these things at once, possibly in a group.
Open your mouth in a 'neutral' position and make a sound. That's an oscillator. Tensing your throat will change the waveform (on a synth that would be square, pulse, sawtooth).
Purse and widen your lips, make a 'wow' sound: that's a low-pass filter (which cuts off higher sound frequencies).
Make a 'shhh' sound: white noise. Purse your lips, make it sound like wind blowing: band-pass filter (which only lets certain frequencies through).
Turn that wind noise into a whistle: now you're adding filter resonance. As that noise becomes a pure tone, the filter becomes self-oscillating.
Add some vibrato to your sound (like an opera singer), or change the pitch (like a siren), and you're adding modulation.
Doing this in a room, or large hall: now you're changing the reverb (reverberation). In a canyon with echoes: delay.
Often, this is also a useful method to work out how to program a subtle or complicated patch (a sound preset on a synth, so named because early modular synths used telephone patch cables to make the necessary connections).
Aside: I've often wondered what a human choir, making 'synthy' sounds, would be able to do with something like Jarre's classic Oxygène IV...