Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Tech Toys Become Modern Instruments

Posted by michael on from the 2600Hz dept.

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.

2 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Analog is cool by Dr.+Tom · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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*.

  2. Circuitbending by uqbar · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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