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Software synthesis ' roots go back as far as the 1950s, when Max Mathews of Bell Labs wrote the MUSIC-N programming language, which was capable of non-real-time sound generation.

The first synthesizer to run directly on a host computer's CPU was Reality, by Dave Smith's Seer Systems, which achieved a low latency through tight driver integration, and therefore could run only on Creative Labs soundcards.

Some systems use dedicated hardware to reduce the load on the host CPU, as with Symbolic Sound Corporation's Kyma System, and the Creamware / Sonic Core Pulsar / SCOPE systems, which used several DSP chips hosted on a PCI card to power an entire studio's worth of instruments, effects, and mixers.