Phase distortion synthesis

Phase distortion synthesis creates different waveforms by modifying the phase angle of a sine wave.

In essence, you can bend a sine wave until it becomes a sawtooth wave, a triangle wave, a square wave, and so on. The synthesizer engine beyond the waveform generators typically follows a subtractive synthesizer design.

Phase distortion synthesis was commercially introduced in the 1984 Casio CZ series synthesizers.