Tech Toys Become Modern Instruments

Anonymous Coward writes: "A classmate of mine is making analog instruments out of, and/or interactive mods to tech toys and voiceboxes. Check them out at carrionsound.com I'm not sure this site could survive even a slight slashdotting, which is why I may not have found it in the archives." Well, there's only one way to find out. We'll try the "early morning" timeframe and see if it survives.

Comments

Skip the splash page?

[mosschops]

Perhaps it'd be a little better to change the main story link to:

http://www.carrionsound.com/menu.htm

as that'd mean everyone isn't loading the 40K image on the homepage, and goes straight to the text menu page. It might give the poor server a fighting chance!

Google Cache?

[heliocentric]

If the site has a problem serving up content (and I sure see that it does) why not link to the Google Cache instead? Ok, so maybe the links on the cache don't like back to the cache, but you don't have to work too hard to get the links added to the URL.

World wide

[natmsincome.com]

While it may be morning in the US over here in Australia it's 6pm. Everyone is just getting home ... can us Aussies bring it down?

Mirror as it becomes available...

[pen]

http://ps6mirror.hypermart.net/www.carrionsound.co m/

More cool synth stuff - download sites.

[Anton Anatopopov]

An interesting couple of sites for analog music fans are propellerhead software (You MUST download the Reason demo - it has to be seen to be believed) and also Jeskola Buzz its a kind of wierdo build your own synth kit.

Buzz is free (as in beer) and Reason is free (as in it doesn't have full functionality) both downloads are well worth the time.

Do it yourself Gesture Research

[beanerspace]

If you look hard enough, and know where to look, one can find an amazing set of "toys" that could be easily modified and/or mass-produced into something useful.

One such page I visited described research in the field of gesture capture, interfaces, and applications to sound synthesis and performance. Yes, it's for music & peformance now, but could be used for communications either by handicapped, or by individuals and situations where the human and/or NON-human voice is muted.

Vocoders are another set of techologies I personally find interesting. Here is a page that offers schematics on how to roll-your-own speach synths, text-to-speech and other goodies ... including do-it-yourself for some rather old computers.

Here's something for you young sprites trying to fake out mom so she thinks your practicing your paino. But remember, you're only cheating yourself !

Of course, you hardwire geeks already know about this one ... PAiA Electronics ... offering user assembled kits for all sorts of electronic products for hobbyists, musicians, education.

Of course, having cut my teeth in electronic music back in the late 70's, in an old analog studio, we saw all sorts of home brewed devices our mad PhD professor put together. From a rubber-band articulator (a record tone arm nailed to a board with a rubber-band and nails to change pitch) to using two tape recorders to get true double-deck dealay (the more nails, the bigger the delay !-). Here is a site that lists similar do it yourself projects.

Toys ... yup ... but I suspect there is also utility for it all.