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

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.

Analog is cool

[Dr. Tom]

Any EE will tell you that analog electronics is basically black magic. Any idiot can do digital electronics but it takes real skill and understanding to do anything analog. Furthermore analog is far more powerful than digital -- in terms of speed and complexity of the computations possible (if not accuracy). But it's harder to control and more difficult to understand. Analog synth is an amazing area and this guy's a real wizard. Some of the posters here will complain that this guy's site is lame because they have NO IDEA what's involved. This is a true melding of Art and Science, not simple hackery.

And before any strong AI freaks slap the Church-Turing hypothesis in my face remember that analog circuits (through non-linearities) have sensitive dependence on initial conditions and are basically computationally irreducible. Sure, you can simulate digitally to any desired degree of accuracy blah blah, but while your simulation is clunking out two milliseconds worth of output the analog synth has been going in real time for an hour. I call that *effective*.

Re:Analog is cool

[torpor]

Absolutes are unobtainable...

Which is why I'll respond to:

Any idiot can do digital electronics but it takes real skill and understanding to do anything analog.

... with the statement: Even better, is doing digital work that is indistinguishable from analog work, to the point that A/B comparisons produce 50/50 results.

As a new member of one of the leading Virtual Analog synthesizer development teams, I can tell you this:

These are very exciting times.

Mirror as it becomes available...

[pen]

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

Scientific Experimentation

[joenobody]

The hypothesis: I'm not sure this site could survive even a slight slashdotting, which is why I may not have found it in the archives

The test:We'll try the "early morning" timeframe and see if it survives.

The result: hypothesis proved

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.

Can the Aussies bring it down?

[Dman33]

I guess as long as your gov't does not censor it first... ;)

Easier path to DIY synths/effects

[Tom7]

Circuit bending is fun. My bandmate and I used to do this back in high school.. we didn't know what were were doing really, but we got plenty of wacked out sounds.

Nowadays we're a little more deliberate, so we make VST Plugins . The VST architecture is totally simple and pretty portable, so it's easy to crank out plugins if you have crazy effects in mind. This might be a good place to start if you know a little C programming and have some ideas.

Circuitbending

[uqbar]

Here is a whole slew of links to the realm of circuit bending (maybe this will distribute the load among those who want to create musical circuit hacks):

http://www.oddmusic.com/illogic/

http://www.anti-theory.com/

http://www.simulated.net/bending/

http://www.hollis.co.uk/john/bent/

http://www.furious.com/perfect/emi/reedghazala.htm l

http://users.ev1.net/~bantha/bending/

http://www.pansiecola.com/space/inappropriate/bend ing/

And even a news group on the topic: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/benders