This guest lecture for ES 25: Engineering the Acoustic World explored analog and digital synthesis on a technical level through the lens of systems and signals. Abstract patch topologies were represented by their networks of nodes and transfer functions and audibly demonstrated on analog and digital hardware. Concepts discussed included oscillation, additive synthesis, waveshaping, frequency spectra and the Fourier Transform, amplitude modulation, and using the mechanical analogy of electricity to represent simple synthesis graphs. The lecture was presented by Sam Wolk.