You mention Axoloti, but not Teensy. The Teensy 4.0 is incredibly fast. And it has got lots of memory. I’ve tried to implement a 31 terts band vocoder in hardware (got it working on an analog devices board with a double 48kHz adda, it has a 50 Mega Floating Point Operations dsp on board) and thought I’d probably end up using an fpga, but this device should do the trick. And the graphical software to build musical devices can easily rival the Axoloti (it certainly does in cpu-power). You may also want to look into the Blue Pill and its faster Black Pill variant. They are so cheap and power full that they will make arduinos go extinct.
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What’s a tert? Google only returns genetic stuff.
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A terts (or should it be tertz?) is a musical measure which is equal to 4 semitones.
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Terts (Dutch) and Terz (German) are synonymous with “third interval” in English. I dont see anything specifically saying if it refers to a major third (4 semitones) or a minor third (3 semitones).
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I’ll describe some early conceptual progress in a software interface, because I’m not yet ready to commit to hardware except at the most basic control surface manipulation level. I’m writing this here to help me to put my ideas into words.
I’m spending a bit of spare time and energy devising a custom visual interface for working in SuperCollider, to represent modular synthesis components during design, creation, modification and use. The basic principle is of tessellating polygons. There’s a fractal concept in there too, but it needs more work, and besides I have to walk before I can run. I want to create something that will be both beautiful and practical to use, and that’s very hard to get right. I’m colour blind but I’ll have to work through that with help from my family because colour is such an expressive visual language. Movement too (animation to a certain degree can also be useful, though the potential for distraction is a disadvantage.) But mainly tessellation, specifically hexagons.
This is way outside my comfort zone. Normally I’m happy working in text, but here I find that my mind is being drawn to aesthetically pleasing visual structures rather than the computational abstractions that have inspired me for so many decades. It should look like science fiction and feel completely intuitive (much like computer source code written in Lisp feels to me as an abstract thinker.)
In hardware patching we have the physical geometry of the panels to guide us, and we readily recall the essential features of a patch at least partly because of the mnemonic capacity of our visual processing apparatus. To exploit that apparatus is the goal of all visual user interfaces. How does one do that while avoiding the Scylla and Charybdis of a too literal implementation that limits the power of the software on one hand, and the ugliness of a spartan Pure Data-style interface?
I’m very impressed by the power of MIDI control surfaces and I’ll be working on my own designs (because existing designs are both very limited and very costly.) I’m currently using an inexpensive Korg Nanokontrol 2 which while too small to be very practical is enough for prototyping. The idea here is that one can devise control sets (“scenes”, I think they’re called in DAW-speak) to apply physical controls to an arbitrary subset of the controls of the modules in play. This kind of ability should be intrinsic to every software control I write. I’ve often mentioned my dream of building a Keith Emerson-style wall of controls and patch cables. If I ever get to that point, the wall should be fully programmable and interact with software in a very intuitive way.
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Hmm, tessellating Koch snowflakes.
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Apropos tessellations and fractals and all things wonderfully geometric, here’s a very good online implementation of Logo. A turtle in your browser!
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Hi, there are some really new basic Arduino-Sketches out there to build funny electronic for musicians:
- Sampler like Casio SK1
- Synth
- B3 Organ
- Drum-Computer
Check for “Marcel Licence” on Youtube und Github. I already used the code of his Drum Computer to create a MOD for my Volca Beats which now sounds like a TR9.
My Volca MOD:
I really believe, these projects could all be a startingoint for things which fit into a Modular-Rack.
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