Synth Interface 2.0
The synth interface prototyped a few posts earlier on this page has had a significant upgrade. The idea was to create a knob-rich interface to connect to Supercollider, a realtime sound synthesis engine. This way the beauty of the old analog synths can interface in a nice way with the versatility and digital possibilities of Supercollider.
The big brainwave on this was to make the faceplate out of whiteboard material, so whenever I adjust the software I can simply wipe off the old mapping and write on a new one. It still uses Teensy as the microprocessor, and it uses the USB-midi mode, which means it's a standard plug and play midi controller...pretty awesome!
I do have some thoughts about making it an OSC device though...v3 ;)
Pen Transducer
Inspired by the awesome Euphonopen, I wanted to try to hear what writing by itself sounds like. How do you do that? With:
...a piezo on a pen into a soundcard...
Twitter Sonification
This is an ongoing project aimed at sniffing the twitter stream. The idea is to use Twitter’s API to get access to a stream of tweets, classify those tweets using a learning/classification algorithm, create generatively composed music to be used to ambiently monitor the twittersphere. The output is more drone than musical at this point, but you can hear the sound of Waterloo’s tweets here:
Synthesizer Interface
The classic design of analog synthesizers includes both a beautiful, playable interface and the ability to hack and modify the electronics inside them. So the question becomes how do you keep these aspects of a synthesizer, while embracing the full possibilities of digital sound synthesis? This project is a work in progress that looks to combine a beautiful real world interface with an open source and modifiable sound synthesis engine. The hardware uses Teensy’s USB-MIDI library and the software is based in Supercollider (https://supercollider.github.io). Right now the synth engine is super-basic, and the interface shown above is definitely not beautiful - a work in progress! You can hear some basic sounds here:
Drum Machine - V1
With the beautiful, but unreleased Teenage Engineering Pocket Operator (www.teenageengineering.com) acting as inspiration, I wanted to try to build my own pocket sized drum machine. It includes 16 beat input buttons, 2 control buttons and a couple knobs - all connected to a 16x2 LCD screen. It uses a Teensy micro controller and the Teensy USB-MIDI library (https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_MIDI.html) to make this homemade drum machine a standard, plug and play midi instrument! Here’s a sample of the drum machine being played through Mainstage 3: