EMUSIC-L Digest Volume 9, Number 3 Today's Topics: Requests for reposting (6 messages) Repost of "Man-Machine Interface Chats" Repost of "Project SyntheSex" Akai S950 question Workstations vs. the modular approach (5 messages) TR808 question Looking for analog modules... Keyboard recommendations? (7 messages) Compilation tape progress report (2 messages) Your EMUSIC-L Digest moderator is Joe McMahon . You may subscribe to EMUSIC-L by sending mail to listserv@american.edu with the line "SUB EMUSIC-L your name" as the text. The EMUSIC-L archive is a service of SunSite (sunsite.unc.edu) at the University of North Carolina. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 16 Oct 89 13:25:00 EST From: METLAY@PITTVMS.BITNET Subject: Posts of archivable materials of interest...? To all concerned: Due to space restrictions on my account, I have to delete my two largest non-work-related files, both of which have some relevance to this List. If people express interest, I'd like to post them here, in the hopes that someone might archive them and/or save them for pleasurable reading. One is the repost of THE MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE, updated with new entries. The other is a digest of a discussion thread that I moderated earlier this year on the UNIX rec.music.synth and alt.sex newsgroups, in what had to be the weirdest crosspost in history. It was called Project SynthsSex(TM), and it was a lighthearted exploration of direct physical stimulation by electro-acoustic means. Some novel ideas were suggested, and some odd and worthwhile materials came up. Caveat: A fair number of posts were from the alt.sex end of things, and they may be a trifle spicy for EMUSIC-L. Note, however, that there is essentially no profanity or explicitness, only a frank (gulp) discussion of some people's experiences, with, well, YOU know. Anyway, is anyone curious? I can also post the latter archive to individual readers and avoid embarrassing the List in general if desired, but I have to do SOMETHING with these files and quickly. thanx metlay ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Oct 89 14:10:00 EDT From: a Pirate twin Subject: RE: Posts of archivable materials of interest...? Project SynthSex (Tm)?! Sounds like it's worth re-posting ... Fire when ready! -brian ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Oct 89 11:30:32 PDT From: Mark Loomis Subject: Re: Posts of archivable materials of interest...? >One is the repost of THE MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE, updated with new entries. >The other is (Synthesex). You can email them to me and I'll save them for you. I already have both of these from when you sent them out earlier -- it sounds like you have updated them so I'd like to get updated copies anyway. Only recently have we been able to read alt.* here at Sun, so if there is any additional content to Synthesex that didn't get posted to rec.music.synth I'd like to see what it was. Later, Mark Loomis loomis@sun.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Oct 89 14:31:01 EDT From: Joe McMahon Subject: Re: Posts of archivable materials of interest...? Yes/yes, please send them. Thanks, Metlay. -- Joe M. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Oct 89 09:17:00 EST From: METLAY@PITTVMS.BITNET Subject: Re: Posts of archivable materials of interest...? Mark: They may be reposted today. If not, they've been archived and I'll announce the archive location. metlay ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Oct 89 11:21:00 EST From: METLAY@PITTVMS.BITNET Subject: By popular demand: THE MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE and SYTHESEX digests Folx, the next two messages I send out will be the two digests I offered. Please stop sending me requests, you're clogging my mail account! |-> The articles have been archived by John Young at Southern CT State, at BITNET address YOUNG@CTSTATEU. After I send them out, they're going to be deleted, so ask him if for some reason you don't get yours. I hope that no one will be offended by the content or language of the SyntheSex post; consider yourselves warned. metlay ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Oct 89 11:23:00 EST From: METLAY@PITTVMS.BITNET Subject: THE MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE (*LONG*) [Here they are, cleaned up a bit and combined. Enjoy, enjoy, and watch out for the extra facts and fictions I threw in on this go-around |->.] ***** PART 1 Emusic-L folx: Well, the response has been remarkably strong, so what the hey: there follows below Part 1 of a detailed, historically and contemporarily relevant, and pretty much irreverent look at the whole process of user interface and electronica, past and present. Structure will be soewhat flaky, but I'll do my best to keep it readable. Also, watch out for smileys |-> , as my own twisted opinions have a way of mixing in with the less arguable factual content of the piece. Okay? Here we go! ***** THE MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE PART 1: THE KEYBOARD The whole relationship between the synthesizer and the ol' black'n'whites has become so well-established, so historically hidebound, so, well, INBRED, that after a while any attempt to interface man and machine by nonkeyboard means has come to be viewed as unnatural and a bit painful, rather like the short- lived pastime of rhino toss. The fact is, the keyboard was NOT by any means the only inevitable controller for the synth, and that in fact a huge number of man-hours have been devoted in recent years to getting around its many shortcomings! Own up and be honest, people. How many of you would have bothered to learn how to play keyboards if they WEREN'T essential to synth operation? I'll admit it: I learned to love the piano for its own sake YEARS after I'd begun working with synths. My first keyboard and my first love was actually the Hammond Organ in our living room, and touch sensitivity for me has always been a weird thing to master. Which gets us into historical perspectives..... The first synthesizer, in general terms, was the pipe organ. Its various manuals and stops allowed the tonal characteristics to be "programmed" by its user, to hint at non-organish sounds to some extent. Arguably, then, the first electric synthesizer would be the first electric organ, right? (Well, no, not right, actually. The first electric synth was the Telharmonium, a monstrous device that filled an entire building, ran its music over Con Ed telephone lines to "Telharmonium Parlors" in New York, generated a vast amount of relay noise and waste heat, and eventually burned down. Alas.) Anyway, the invention and proliferation of the electric organ produced one seemingly inescapable chain of facts, as follows: -Notes must be activated by the player, somehow. -In an electric device, you activate things by closing switches. --Ergo, the player must play switches, one for each note. This is the Switch Proposition. The second chain of facts states: -The easiest way to design switches in an understandable array is to use a keyboard. After all, that's how organ manufacturers did it for centuries. --Ergo, it makes good sense, both from a standpoint of constructive ease and from one of familiarity, to put a traditional organ keyboard on a synth. This is the Keyboard Proposition. Both of these modes of thinking are fallacious and full of holes, but they established the industry as we know it today rather than allow synthesis to go the way of the kazoo as a fad, so I guess we shouldn't complain. |-> The manufacturers couldn't have foreseen the trend they were starting; while many individuals utilized non-keyboard means of doing things (to be covered elsewhere), a large number relied on the cheap and easily wired organ keyboards for their research. A lot of good ideas that violated one or the other of the above propositions ended up enjoying little or no popularity due to the essential "alienness" of their design. It was nothing short of a miracle that the Ondes Martenot enjoyed the popularity it had at the early part of the century (Ravel, I believe, wrote a number of pieces for it), in light of the fact that it had a keyboard, but that the keys didn't move when touched. Some designers relegated themselves to obscurity by their refusal to give in to the pressure of traditionalism: Lev Theremin, Serge Tcheprenin, Don Buchla, Louis and Bebe Barron, and so on. Others gave in to the pressure of keyboard use, but reserved a number of other means of controlling timbre, resulting in the fusion of keyboard and "Left Hand" control we see today: Robert Moog, Allan Pearlman, and Hugh LeCaine, whose left-hand controls for the Electronic Sackbut (It's a medieval trumpet of sorts, people. Get yer minds outa the gutters! |-> ) set a standard for expressiveness in real time that no one, and I mean NO ONE, has yet to equal. But the keyboard, as a means of selecting event start and note pitch, stuck, and gradually evolved into the form we see today. The pressures to produce an instrument that could be triggered reliably as well provide a pitch reference recognizable by some large percentage of ordinary musicians resulted in the vast majority of synths being controlled by keyboards. (The fact that the piano is a staple instrument in most music schools must have helped a bit too, as schools were where the first synths were used heavily.) So where are we now? Well, the "average" synth keyboard has 61 unweighted plastic keys, each with a contact switch and some means (electromagnetic or optical) of sensing how quickly the key is struck. Some also can tell how quickly the key is released, and many have sensors under the keybed to detect pressure after the notes have been struck and held, either one for the entire keybed or tiny ones under each key. These are the familiar velocity, release velocity, and aftertouch sensitivities we demand from today's synths. It should be noted that they developed at differing rates; Moog made at least one synth that had pressure sensitivity without velocity sensitivity, and the Sequential Prophet T8, one of the first MIDI synths, had poly pressure rather than mono. When it went out of production, poly pressure languished as an unused part of the MIDI spec for years, until the Kurzweil and Ensoniq instruments revived it. There have been other modifications to keyboard design as well: see this month's issue of KEYBOARD for a bizarre but intriguing Japanese keyboard design using multiple rows of keys, all white, and consider the Yamaha GX1, whose keys bent pitch if you shifted them from side to side! And, of course, the recent renaissance of piano technique in pop music has strongly encouraged the development of weighted actions of 73, 76, and 88 keys on many synths. There are even a few synths that have gone beyond this, such as the 95-key Bohm controller or the 97-key Beilfuss. The keyboard has a certain monopoly over our electronic thought processes even today, though alternatives abound, but it's no longer either stagnant or monopolistic. In fact, I rather think I'd miss having one around: getting crazy is more fun if you have a reference point to ignore! |-> ***** That's it for part 1. In future parts of this series, if demand indicates, we'll consider other means of applying traditional technique to electronics through special controllers, then delve into my favorite topic: realtime timbral control, via left-hand and other controllers. Look for the Electronic Sackbut, the Theremin, the Ondes Martenot, and the GX1 to reappear, as well as the Starwind, the Cyclone, the KAT, the WX7 and EWI, the Simmons SDSV, the ElectroHarmonix Drums, Moog's system 55, the Buchla synths, the VCS3, the EPS and VFX by Ensoniq, the Yamaha MCS2, the Mellotron, the IVL Pitchrider and Fairlight Voicetracker, the Grid, the Roland GR500 and its many children, the SynthAxe, the Oncor PolyTouch, and various ribbons, wheels, levers, buttons, sliders, switches, joysticks, paddles, mice, pedals, and hooters. ("Hooters"?) [Yeek! Looks like I missed a bunch in the long run. Well, it's never too late. I'll get to them this time.] ***** PART 2 More, you say? MORE, you say? At ONCE, I say! ***** THE MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE, PART 2 PERCUSSION CONTROLLERS Ah, drums. Whackety whackety whack! How we all love to hit things and hear them make noise... it's a primal instinct we all share. The love of percussion is as old as civilization, and it's a safe bet that the sorts of percussion devices we consider commonplace these days were elegantly refined millenia before the keyboard came along. So it was inevitable that when someone discovered that you could press a key on a synth and it would go "CRASH!", they might have begun to muse that it might be eminently (pardon the pun. Actually, pat yourself on the back if you even spotted it! |-> ) more satisfactory to give some undefined THING a good whack and hear it go "CRASH!" instead. And the rest is history.... The first well-known electronic drum was the Moog percussion controller, a pad with an impact-sensitive resistance in it that could send a trigger signal and a voltage based on impact velocity to a monophonic synth. Each synth had to be patched individually for each pad, but the sound was (to audiences in 1974) never before heard. Check out Toccata, from ELP's BRAIN SALAD SURGERY, or the live version on WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS.... for a real taste of history. The late 1970's saw a huge proliferation of affordable analog drum pads, each with its own unique sound and character. There were the Synares (I almost bought a rusty old Synare 1 recently; they're rare as hens' teeth and sound great!) from 1 to 4, ranging from 4-pad synths to single drums, the Syndrum and Syndrum CN, the Pearl synthetic drums favored by Klaus Schulze, and (sigh) the ElectroHarmonix drums, a series of cheap, ugly devices that were a hell of a lot of fun to work with: the Space Drum, Clap Track, Crash Pad, Sonic Boomer, Rolling Thunder, and Clockworks "Percussion Brain." The Space Drum, with its awful descending "Pooooo....", was a huge part of what made disco forgettable, and makes it impossible to listen to the live version of Jean-Michel Jarre's Magnetic Fields II from LES CONCERTS EN CHINE without laughing fit to die. But drummers perservered; there was something here that they liked, and there had to be a way to get to it...! And then along came the rhythm machine, and the music world began talking about the demise of the live drummer. Remember those days? Boy, I do. And I remember a guy whom everyone laughed at and made fun of, too. His name was Dave Simmons, and he had one hell of a good idea up his sleeve. Trivia question: What's the first album in history to feature the classic Simmons sound? Give up? It's 1980's FROM THE TEA ROOMS OF MARS TO THE HELL HOLES OF URANUS by Landscape. Great disc, actually, and the Simmons drums were all over it. They really hit the scene when Bill Bruford took them on tour with King Crimson the following year, and since then, Simmons has defined the state of the art in electronic drums, from the old hard plastic ones to the zone-sensitive ones for the SDX.... and now they're out of business. Alas! Technology advances, thank goodness, and the technology of pads is no different. The old sensors have largely been replaced with transducers and film-pack force sensitive resistors, making the newer pads more reliable and tough than their parents. Also, the epidemic of "Simmons wrist" has led to more ergonomic designs for playing surfaces. As for expressive control, the real key lies in what sort of interactive software comes with the pads, for setting up gate times, response curves, and so on. After all, a hit is a hit is a hit if that's the only data you're feeding your synths. We've come a long way from the rubber discs of the Synsonics kits (remember them?) or the genuine leather pads of the MXR Kit (I almost bought one, in 1982... sorry I didn't, now...)! Other notables in the "stuff to hit" genre included the Octapad and its many, many imitators (the original Roland design still providing the best pad-to-pad isolation in the business), the Kat and Silion Mallet for marimba types, and various bizarre MIDI devices like the Dynacord Rhythm Stick. (What a screech THAT thing was!) And although Simmons are no more, the modularity of MIDI has spawned a whole slew of percussion controllers accessing drum box sounds, samplers, and even (gasp!) the occasional analog synth. These days, the stores are again filled with cheap drum pads, but now they're digitally sampled and often have rhythm sequences built in! But I'll admit that my tastes run to hitting an Octapad and listening to my Xpander go "CRASH!", but then again I've always been hidebound! |-> I think that a fundamental understanding of rhythm is vital to a musician's sensibilities, and there's something wonderful and visceral about actually playing a drum. That's why I find that the most convincing drum tracks on electronic albums these days tend to be done live, at least with an Octapad. And even if you can't afford the cheapest MIDI controllers, like the $100 Yamaha dd5, you can always get a HandClapper or SpaceDrum and go wild! ***** Next, in Part 3, we get a little more serious, as we discuss more serious technical problems in a look at stringed instrument control of synthesis. ***** PART 3 Here we go again, folx. Feedback on Pt 1 was largely positive, and Pt 2 didn't seem to generate much comment at all, so let's see how we do this time.... ***** THE MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE, PART 3 STRINGED INSTRUMENTS The guitar and its cousins are, in comparison to keyboards and drums, huge pains in the anatomy to use as control devices. Why? Because they violate both the Switch Proposition (each note is not an event in itself) and the Keyboard Proposition (There's no logical layout for pitch reference in a mechanical way). But guitrists are an insistent lot, so let's look at the history books, but not until after we have a quick tutorial on the technology! There are two recognized means of controlling synthesizers from a stringed instrument. One is to mechanically analogue the control surfaces of the instrument and map them to a synth control interface, and the other is to read the actual notes as they are played and interpret them for the synth's use. These two procedures, which (for reasons that'll be obvious in a moment) I'll call "fretwiring" and "pitchtracking", each have strong advantages and disadvantages, which should be enumerated here. FRETWIRING has the strong advantage of being as quick and responsive as the keyboard on a traditional synth. The analogue reads your actions as fast as you can act, and the synth responds at the speed of light. In addition, it is easier to directly incorporate control of the timbre or nuance of the synth tone into such a design, merely by adding the appropriate sensors for the types of mechanical movement the player will produce as he plays. In other words, the instrument follows one's movements perfectly and instantly. The disadvantages of fretwiring are in its incredible complexity and expense, as the guitar neck must be wired to sense fret contact by each string (hence the name) and other performance sensors must be able to quickly and accurately follow the guitarist's movements. Also, it is rare that such an instrument can function properly and yet still serve as a real electric guitar, making a synth/guitar blended sound impossible. Lastly, while the possibility of direct timbral control of the synth exists, it must usually be implemented at least in part by controls that are not common parts of the guitarist's technique. PITCHTRACKING relies on circuitry and special pickups that follow string movement and determine the pitch and amplitude of a note being played (hence the name). The string is plucked, the pickup or other sensor reads its relevant data, and the synth is informed accordingly. The advantages of this system are its ability to be easily and nondestructively mounted to any good guitar, allowing for a natural playing style and a blend of guitar and synth timbres, and its relatively low expense and ease of upkeep. Its primary disadvantage is in the tracking process itself: it takes some finite amount of time to read a guitar's pitch, and more time to translate that pitch to a voltage, and more time to go from voltage to MIDI. Thus, guitarsynths can be noticeably slower and sloppier in the synth output than in the straight guitar sound. This problem is compounded by the fact that many guitar nuances serve only to confuse the pickup, imposing an artificial and stilted playing style on the player. Lastly, any performance controls that the synth alone will require must somehow be attached to the already cramped guitar body, causing potential confusion and clutter. So how did these two approaches fare through history? Well, the early years were dominated by pitchtrackers, as the pitch-to-voltage converter was a neat technical problem that folks had been working on for years. Early synths, such as the Korg X911, were monophonic: only one cleanly-played note could be played at a time. The ARP Avatar was another example of this strategy. Sadly, these instruments were ahead of what the technology could do, and while the Korg was only an embarrassment, the Avatar contributed strongly to the death of ARP, alas. The first Zeta pickups appeared at about this time, for use with outboard P/V converters and synths. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a profusion of these gizmos, and few if any worked well. Notable, though, were boxes like the ElectroHarmonix MicroSynthesizer, which was nothing more than a square-wave divide-down box, and the Oncor Touch guitar, which was the first fretwired instrument in production: it had metal bars in place of strings, and was actually an oddly-shaped monophonic synthesizer! The guitarsynth's evolution progressed slowly into the 1980s, and might still be progressing today, if not for the interest taken by one particular company in the challenge: Roland. Their first attempt, the GR500, utilized a bass synth, a mono synth, a string machine, and a divide-down polyensemble, all controlled by a hexaphonic pickup on a very nice guitar. It tracked half decently, it sounded great, and it was a big hit at once. (The guitar parts on "Follow You Follow Me" by Genesis on 1978's AND THEN THERE WERE THREE are all GR500.) Roland followed this up with the GR300 series, which Robert Fripp made his own (see any King Crimson album from 1981 or after), and eventually, the GR700, which was a breakthrough in three areas: it was a true polyphonic guitar synthesizer, it could be set up reliably and personalized easily to each guitarist's touch, and IT HAD MIDI! Since then, Roland's main drive has ben to get faster and faster tracking pickups, and to an extent they've succeeded. Ibanez has also marketed a MIDI guitar, with a MIDI whammybar! The fretwired guitars were much later in coming, but they had advantages. Muting didn't faze them, nor did hammerons and pulloffs, and unlike pitch sensors, if the neck was designed right they didn't mind bends at all. The first and most famous of these was of course the SynthAxe, an $11,000 MIDI monstrosity that was enormously powerful and expressive, but actually required a fair amount of retraining to use properly. (Allan Holdsworth's ATAVACHRON and SAND are loaded with SynthAxe work.) The Stepp DG1, though the company died, was an improvement on the SynthAxe in terms of familiarity of use. Other designs that attempted to avoid pitchtracking problems utilized sonar or light sensors (the Yamaha GC10 and Beetle Quantar), but these combined the disadvantages of limited fretwire control and no real guitar sound and hence didn't catch on terribly well. On the flip side, Zeta is marketing a guitar now called the Mirror 6, which is a real guitar that at great expense has been totally fretwired, giving the ultimate in both sides of the coin. The instrument's cost (about $2000) has been offputting, but field reports say it may well be the wave of the future. As for other instruments in the string family, the bass guitar has been approached only by Roland and Zeta. Roland's attempts to quickly track the low-frequency bass notes have been frustrating, but Zeta has hinted at a Mirror 4 bass to be released. Zeta have also developed a violin synth, utilizing a special pickup. Since there are no frets and the bow doesn't always start a note cleanly, this instrument uses pitchtracking, and does fair to middling in following synths. Its real strengths, according to users like Jean-Luc Ponty and Emilysue Pinnell, are as an electric violin, which can be transposed down into the cello range without difficulty. [The Chapman Stick has a MIDIed fretwired version called the Grid. (What's a Chapman Stick? Eek, that's kinda tough to explain. Maybe another time....)] If I've missed any designs, feel free to remind me of them. But as for the future, my money's on a dichotomy of designs: some folks only want a guitar sound with something else behind it, and for them the Roland designs will do fine for cheap, but others want the precise control of fretwiring and will pay to get it. That being the case, I think that real-guitar-based designs like the Zeta will eventually win the day, as they do leave open a chance to play the real thing. As prices drop, we'll see who comes out on top, if any one type does. In the meantime, we'll have to get used to guitar runs with string chords tagging along behind them, I guess.... ***** Part 4 will be delayed for a trip to do research elsewhere in the USA. But when I get back, we'll look at wind instruments and the problems they pose for synthesis. I'll also be taking suggestions for other instruments to cover, because if I don't get any, then in the fifth and final part I'm planning to cover all of the bizarro forms of synth control that have come along over the years, from the pitch wheel to the HANDS. ***** PART 4 Well, here we are in Part 4 of my little series. Feedback has been sporadic but generally friendly, so I'll quit while I'm ahead (after this installment and the next one, which will cover unusual timbre and nuance controllers). ***** THE MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE, PART 4 WIND CONTROLLERS The wind and brass instruments fall in between stringed and keyboard instruments in terms of translational difficulty: while there are sets of keys that definitely tell the instrument what note is being played, the nuances of breath control are perhaps more complex than those of string playing. Lip and tongue pressure, expulsion of air, and jaw stiffness can control vibrato, loudness, tremolo, even pitch bends and octave jumps. But the fascination of combining this sort of expressiveness with the sounds of the synth has fascinated people for decades, and a number of attempts were made: The two most famous historical wind controllers were the Lyricon and the EWI and EVI. The Lyricon, marketed by Computone, was a clarinet-like controller that allowed pitch and vibrato control over analog synths through variable control voltage levels. The EWI was a similar development using a different approach to control style, and the EVI was a design for trumpeters. While to hear the EWI you'd need to dig up albums featuring people like Michael Brecker, the Lyricon was actually a fairly well-known beastie: Emerald Web used them a lot, and the Tangerine Dream album CYCLONE features one. Another device was the selfcontained Starwind, a mono synth with a melodica keyboard and elementary breath control. Neat device, and inexpensive, but never caught on. It would take the advent of MIDI to produce the same sort of revolution in wind control that had occurred elsewhere in the industry. But, as the guitar types were learning, "digital" didn't neccessarily mean "good," alas. The primary advantage of these early devices was that they utilized analog signal control, hence had infinite degrees of control shading. Digital control, by definition, was coarser, and the Yamaha WX7, the first MIDI wind driver, suffered from some complaints in this regard, as does the newer, simpler WX11. The newer EWI and EVI, now made by Akai, actually run a special synth via analog voltages, hence preserving the expressiveness. They, however, suffer from a non-intuitive keying system that many players find unpleasant to use. Other instruments include the Synthophone, the Atrisyn MIDIsax, and the Sting. Each has its own approach to handling the dual needs of familiarity to seasoned players and of faithful synth control, and each involves tradeoffs in terms of performance control, expressiveness, and cost. The WX11, for instance, has a far more limited set of expressive capabilities than any other wind driver as of now, but it's simple to learn and quite cheap. The Synthophone, on the other hand, is built inside a real sax, but suffers from high cost and limited synth control. The WX7 is considered difficult to "set up" by individual players, and the MIDIsax doesn't even allow certain types of setups to be performed, though it does have a number of useful features like expression controllers and a program readout where the player can see it easily. And the list goes on. [One thing should be mentioned here, and wasn't: there is an equivalent approach to pitchtracking in the guitar synth realm, although I've devoted all of my time to the wind equivalent of fretwired controllers. The device in question is the pitch-to-MIDI converter, which listens to a microphone and outputs a MIDI data stream, much in the same way as the hex pickup on a Roland guitar. Pitch-to-voltage converters have been around for ages; Moog marketed a pretty good one, and the Korg X911 was based on one. But the newest age of pitch-to-MIDI converters are generally quite a bit more accurate, easy to set up, and they have features determined by price, from the MIDImic, a plastic toy that you sing into to play your synth, up to the Fairlight Voicetracker, a $2500 box that tracks just about anything, just about flawlessly. The IVL Pitchrider, a median-level box, was quite popular for wind players recently. The big problem with this method, though, is its lack of any sort of expression control, other than pitch and loudness. On the other hand, you can use it with any mikeable sound source, including the human voice.] The ultimate test, though, appears to be in the hands of the player. While the guitar synths have divided their users into two clear camps, the wind drivers are so diverse in their capabilities and limitations that it seems neccessary for the individual to do a great deal of legwork before making a personally satisfactory choice. These days, the two best sellers are the EWI (due to its expressive synth control and Akai's strong commitment to making it succeed) and the WX7 (customizable to each player's embouchure and touch, universal in MIDI control use, and now quite cheap now that it's out of production). We'll have to see what the future holds. Oh, and what synths are normally used with them? Hmm, the Akai comes with its own, and the WX11 does too (It's suggested to use a TX81Z with the WX7), but outside of those obvious choices, the strong favorite is the analog-controllable, MIDI-compatible, UNBELIEVABLE-sounding Oberheim Xpander. It's also got a strong following among guitar synthesists in both camps, for similar reasons, although I know of no one using it heavily for percussion applications. Its rich analog sound and fine controllability by multitimbral devices make it a natural. (Forgive me, folx; I have two. |-> ) ***** Next, our fifth and final part will cover timbral controllers of various sorts. If you have a bizarre favorite, please let me know, and don't be shy about which category they fall under: I'll be covering oddball keyboards, pads, stringed devices, and wind drivers as well as other stuff! ***** PART 5 Well. Here we are at the end of this little series. If there's anything I've missed, please feel free to ask me, and I'll include it later. But for now.... ***** THE MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE, PART 5 UNUSUAL CONTROLLERS When I say "unusual" I mean stuff that either puts a new wrinkle on old ways of determining pitch and start/stop times of events, or entirely new methods of doing so. I'll be skipping all over the place, and I'm sorry for that, but it was either unformatted or never to be finished, so what the hey. The pre-MIDI era, and in fact the pre-digital era, abounded with bizarre attempts at control devices. As has been mentioned elsewhere, the Ondes Martenot had a ribbon attached to a ring on the player's finger, that slid back and forth as he played and served as a control device in that fashion. But for the most part, the pre-vacuum tube age relied mainly on old standbys of the organ design palette for control: stops and keys. With the development of vacuum-tube synths, and then solid-state devices for electronic tone generation, came a new generation of devices for realtime shaping of tone and timbre. The simple organ-stop designs of early keyboards were cast aside in favor of a plethora of new approaches, the traditional keyboard was cast aside with somewhat less success, and in some cases both were simultaneously cast aside in favor of a new, combined tone-timbre control system. For example, I'm sure that everyone here has at least heard of the Theremin: it was a marvelously expressive instrument in the hands of a skilled player, and they were turning up in various and sundry places for decades after their invention. The Theremin consisted of two antennas, one horizontal and one vertical (at least in traditional form). The player held one hand over the horizontal antenna, and waved the other hand near the vertical antenna. The horizontal antenna controlled loudness and the vertical one controlled pitch, based on the proximity of the player's hands to them. As late as the early 1980s, there were Theremins available to generate CVs for synthesizers, and there exists a Theremin society even today. Jimmy Page uses one in THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME, and at least one version of the theme from STAR TREK uses one as a solo instrument. I had a chance to play one a few years ago; it's not as easy as it sounds, but the degree of nuance and subtlety were obvious even to a neophyte like myself. Other attempts to remove the early synthesizers from their dependence on traditional keyboards took the form of, well, alternate keyboards. There's been an ongoing argument as to whether or not the ole black'n'whites are the best means of controlling ANY instrument of a keyboardish nature, including the piano and harpsichord, and a number of acoustic pianos and synths have been developed with alternative keyboard designs. The Vandervoort keyboard uses a design similar to that developed by von Janko earlier in this century; it uses four rows of keys in whole-tone series, allowing for consistent fingerings and easy multi-octave jumps regardless of key signature. It was designed in 1976 and was originally envisioned as a "shell" to be placed over a traditional keyboard; what's funny is that KEYBOARD wrote of it as a failed and forever lost idea in their Feb. 1987 issue (A great reference, by the way), and just last week, MUSIC TECHNOLOGY mentioned the Vandervoort in a working prototype form as being on display at last summer's NAMM show-- complete with a photograph! Ironic, isn't it? Another, less well-known design was the Secor keyboard, which utilized a honeycomb of 240 multicolored hexagonal keys to allow easy (sic) use of microtonal scales in performance. Its inventor, George Secor, said of it that for less than 31 tones per octave it wasn't worth learning, and that even if it never caught on it would look great as a prop in a SF movie. That's for sure: only two Secor keyboards were ever built, for a little-known synth called the Motorola Scalatron, and they were BIZARRE! Beautiful, but bizarre. Another proponent of alternate designs was Don Buchla, whose wonderful synths almost never featured traditional keys. (One exception was the Touche, his one attempt at a commercial machine: more on it in a moment) He instead preferred capacitance touchplates, which were pressure sensitive yet had no moving parts to break down. A Buchla synth was a sight to see, with arrays of keys, controllers and expression devices laid out as no more than patterns of wire on a flat plate: almost like playing a bas-relief sculpture of a keyboard. The design was simple, reliable, and infinitely flexible, and he still uses it heavily today. Its one drawback to most users was its lack of tactile feedback; it didn't move when you touched it. Nevertheless, the touchplate design was inexpensive to build and reproduce, so if feedback was less important than economy, it got used-- a LOT. Entire 1980s instruments in the pre-MIDI era used touchpad keyboards: the ElectroHarmonix Mini Synth (of which I proudly own one, and love to death), the EDP Wasp (Black and yellow keys...eegh!), and one oddity called the Dubreq Stylophone, which required that a stylus be used to touch each key. (It didn't catch on.) [The Stylophone was novel for one other idea, as well: a photocell that allowed volume control by waving a hand over the machine.] For people who insisted on the old-fashioned piano keyboard, there were still a lot of frontiers to cross: one manufacturer has marketed a keyboard which not only has velocity and pressure sensitivity, but where each key can move in and out or side to side! Watching one of those in action is kind of frightening; like someone put LSD in your tip jar.... The Yamaha GX-1, the half-ton monstrosity made famous by Keith Emerson, had at least one keyboard manual that allowed side-to-side key motion. (As an aside: I'm looking for data on this beast: I know nothing of what it could and couldn't do, how many were made, or how it worked. All I know is, it weighed nearly 1000 pounds, had two fullsize key manuals and one minikey manual, and Keith Emerson had two: one which got destroyed by a runaway farm tractor (no, really!) and one he got from John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin. Stevie Wonder had one, and so did Jurgen Fritz of Triumvirat (who was famous for having one of everything Keith had, no matter what). Other than that, I'm stuck. Help!) And then, of course, there were always the feet: organ bass pedals have been in existence for centuries, and from the Moog Taurus to the MIDIstep they haven't been far from the electronic world either. Beyond the realm of actually playing the keyboard, however, was the area of controlling the sound as one played. The area of timbral control is even richer than the area of keyboard triggering, and has spawned all sorts of approaches to seemingly trivial problems. Consider the two most common ways to alter a sound played on a synth (not including the sustain pedal, which is one thing that survived unscathed from the piano pedagogy): pitch bending, or the addition of vibrato or tremolo, i.e. LFO modulation of frequency or volume. "That's easy, man! You just get these two things on the left side of the board, and...." Yes? And do what? Pull them, push them, wiggle them, stroke them, press them, punch them, squeeze them, what? And in which direction? Up, down, left, right, in, out, forwards, backwards? And what do they do when you let go: return to zero? Stay put? Keep going to some preset destination without your help? Hmmm? Well, the answer to all of the above questions is, of course, "Yes," so it might pay to look a bit at the simplest (HAH!) of control surfaces before we get on to the heavier stuff.... The proliferation of left-hand controllers on the market, today just as badly as yesterday, is due to three factors: ergonomics ("What feels best to a player?"), functionality ("What'll work best for a technique of play?") and, alas, marketing ("To hell with Items One and Two: What'll make us look different than everybody else?"). In the beginning, pitch and expression control was performed by varying control voltages on modular synths, and this has persisted to the later, hard-wired synths. Nowadays, it's done with digital data messages, allowing for some new wrinkles, but the fundamental ideas haven't changed much. You're holding a note, and you want the timbre to DO something: so what do you do? Well, on the old modular synths, you grabbed a knob and turned it. Simple enough, but it lacked something. So the earliest synths for the mass market, the Moog modulars, had a ribbon controller: you put your finger on it, and the pitch jumped up a bit. The jump depended on where you touched it, and when you let go it jumped back. Simple, right? Well, there were a lot of lead synthesists whose techniques relied on them, and when Moog stopped putting them on their machines, Yamaha did: the only MIDI ribbon available today is on their KX5 strapon. I love it! The replacement for the ribbon, of course, was the wheel, and this is still (in its MANY forms) the most popular type of controller today. How do they work? Well, that depends on the synth. For an old Moog, the left one's bidirectional and is used for pitch bends, with or without a center detent, and the right one's unidirectional and is used for LFO modulation. This "standard" (with the modern additions of a spring return-to-zero on the pitch wheel) is used by Ensoniq, Emu, Yamaha, and on older Roland and Korg boards. Oberheim uses a reversed design that was copied by Chroma and (partially) by Kurzweil: the wheels are shaped like paddles, and both are bidirectional and springloaded. Older designs for such a mod wheel were "dead" in one direction; nowadays, each direction accesses a different modulation (VCO vs. VCF, perhaps). Roland has a side-to-side pitch paddle, which is pushed forward for modulation: I, personally, find this design unusable and not a little silly. Korg uses a joystick for pitch bend and two types of modulation (left, flat; right, sharp; up, VCO; down, VCF) that wouldn't be bad if the joystick moved in a circular well rather than a square one and wasn't so flimsy, argh! But I digress. The joystick idea was also marketed as a pressure plate, where the XY position of the fingertip sent out voltages. Another idea that ARP tried was the PPC, or Proportional Pressure Controller: three pads, on which you rested your left index, middle, and ring fingers as you played. Pressing one bent up, pressing another bent flat, and the one in the middle added modulation. (It didn't sell.) Then there was Yamaha's old setting-the-clock pitchbender, and... You get the idea. One other expression controller, that's been single handedly shoved into the spotlight by Yamaha, is the hooter: the Breath Controller. It's a gizmo that generates a CV based on breath pressure, allowing lines to be articulated as with a wind or brass instrument. As Chick Corea once wrote: "You get into blowing." The Yamaha MCS2 specializes, in fact, in adding controllers to MIDI pianos and the like: you get a MIDI merger that adds a pitch wheel, mod wheel, hooter, two footpedals, two footswitches, two sliders, and three buttons to your MIDI control arsenal. Yippee! Of course, this doesn't hold a candle to the single best design for left-handed control of a synthesizer ever, which was invented by Hugh LeCaine in the 1950s for his Electronic Sackbut. The left hand rested on a plate, with each of the four fingers controlling a slider that varied some component of the sound in realtime, so flexing the fingers caused a very smooth and natural evolution of acoustic-imitative sounds such as strings. And the thumb, not to be outdone, rested on a sliding pad that moved joystick-like across a circular plate that was divided into different waveform types, and allowed formants and waves to be blended in real time with a twitch of the thumb. Only LeCaine himself ever mastered this instrument, but the sound was, well, amazing. The imitation of a string quartet he did in 1958 was frighteningly real, not so much in sound but in articulation of the instruments' bowstrokes! Other parts of the body were used for timbral control, of course: footpedals and footswitches were and are common, and the GX-1 had a gizmo for bending pitch when the player drove his knee up under the keybed. Visceral! Now, one off-the-wall area of timbral control that deserves a mention, simply because it's an idea that just won't die (for obvious reasons), is that of event triggering as part of the performance controls. For example, instead of pressing the pitch wheel up a half step and hoping one doesn't overshoot, one presses a button that tells the synth, "Bend up a half step, at such-and-such a speed." This idea could be applied to anything: sequences of notes, chords, vibrato or other modulatory effects, and so on. And although the obvious way to do such things these days would be with a MIDI sequencer, the idea's far older than that. An early strap-on synth called the Syntar (used a lot by Michael Garrison, among others) had nine such buttons on its "neck" as user- settable triggers, and the Buchla Touche was designed to operate in this fashion from the ground up. Nowadays, we have the Roland Axis, whose thumb button or finger buttons or footswitch can be set to slowly bring in Controller 1, and the MIDI Mitigator, where every footswitch can deliver up to 256 bytes of user-choosable MIDI data... even System Exclusive, so that you can turn a knob on your-- wait a minute! Isn't this where we came in? |-> [I don't know how I forgot my utter favorite of event generators: the arpeggiator! It's worth an article of its own, but I should point out that before MIDI, they could be found on synths from Roland, Korg, and Sequential, and nowadays there are MIDI arpeggiators on the Oberheim Xk, Emu Emax, Sequential Prophet 2000 and Prophet VS (notable for its Sackbut-like waveform blend joystick as well), Roland's new U-20, and a standalone box that is too much fun to be legal, the Oberheim Cyclone.] And then, almost exclusively thanks to MIDI, we have the explosion of percussion controllers; it's now possible to create drums sounds with nuance and timbral variety from a number of sources. The Acoustic drummer can supplement his kit with an electronic "box-o-pads" like an Octapad, DrumKat, or Portakit: not a new idea, as MXR was marketing an analog version nearly twenty years ago! And there's the Rhythm Stick, a strapon drum controller you fret to select sounds and hit to play them, and the PKI GunDrums, which are fired like pistols to play sounds selected by the thumbs. Triggers are built into the heels of shoes, into glasses frames, into body suits: there's no limit now to the event control of MIDI via impact. And what of the future? Well, we're seeing bits of it today, in the Airdrums, a pair of MIDI batons that send messages when moved on their axes in various directions, and the Hands of Michael Waisvicz that control synth parameters in real time by flexing the fingers, touching the palms, waving the arms and turning the hands (I want a pair. BADLY!). Robert Moog recently spoke of a design student's idea for a pole-shaped controller with keys on its grips, played in a dancelike motion. And for the instruments themselves? I have fond memories of the instrument that sank PPG: the Realizer, where you punched a button and the entire front panel changed. Bip! It's a Minimoog. Bip! It's a DX7. Bip! It's an Emulator.... Yes, this is a good time to be an experimental musician. Maybe most of you will never take the time to wonder about all of this "man-machine interface" stuff, but I know that my creativity goes way up whenever I do... It's just part of the process with me. And I hope that maybe I've given some of you some food for thought. Thanks for listening. Oh, before I forget: I did get one contribution, from Pete Lucas: ***** Man-machine-interface: One instrument i came across some years back was a thing called a 'Tactophone'. It was a metal framework (steel tubes and angle sections bolted together, standing about 3 feet high) with wires stretched between the upper and lower members, in the style of a harp. It had about thirty strings if my memory is correct. An electronically energised coil vibrated the top member, and hence the strings, there were pickups on the individual strings along the bottom edge. Output from the pickups was fed back to the energiser, hence if you plucked a string, and then took your hands off the instrument, you could get a sustained note, or a note that died away very slowly, depending on the settings of the amplifiers (oh yes, i forgot to mention, there was a mass of amplifiers, ring modulators, notchfilters etc attached, with a console for the sound engineer to manipulate) You could run your fingers up and down a string, instead of plucking it, this produced noises like a musical saw (ethereal wailings reminiscent of the ondes martenot, or running a wet finger round the rim of a glass), or alternatively, since some of the strings were wound, running a hard metal object up & down the strings made interesting grating/screeching sounds. If you got the gain of the amplifiers just right, then merely touching a string very lightly would start off a vibration, which would grow louder and louder and louder. Brushing a feather across all the strings sounded nice. There was a pedal attached to the electronics, which cut the amplifier (and i think also introduced negative feedback, coz it seemed to damp the vibrations very fast indeed). I also saw the thing tipped on its side (strings horizontal) and played like a xylophone with two metal rods as 'sticks'. The 'player' and 'composer' of music for the beast was, if i remember, called David Morkrum (or was it Morkum, Morecambe?). Wonder if you've heard of this 'thing'? Possibly under a different name? Pete L. ***** Well, thanks for your attention. I hope folks got something worthwhile out of all this; I had a lot of fun going back through my archives getting this stuff out. Now it's time for me to go back into the studio; I just had this great idea for a song, using nothing but a pitch bender.... metlay | Musicians these days seem to require an (the "m.m." stands for | "attitude" as part of their persona: anger, "my moniker's") | lust, boredom, cynicism, piety, whatever. metlay@pittvms.BITNET | What's mine? Hmmmm.... I'd say, a good metlay@vms.cis.pitt.EDU | belly laugh! [And thanks again for your kind words. This file is now archived by John Young at CT state U. His Bitnet address is YOUNG@CTSTATEU.] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Oct 89 11:23:00 EST From: METLAY@PITTVMS.BITNET Subject: PROJECT SYNTHESEX (*LONG*) [This is the complete Project SyntheSex(tm) digest, edited for cleanliness and with comments inserted where neccessary. Have fun!] ***** [the post that started it all] Hi folx. I just know I'm going to get flamed for this, but what the hey, life's short. |-> I'm an electronic musician whose opinions are (much too) well-known on .synth, but I confess to being only a first- or second-time poster to alt.sex, so forgive me if I accidentally trample any Netiquette..... One of the most fascinating aspects of electronic music, part and parcel of its ability to create new and unique sonorities never before heard on the planet, is its ability to directly stimulate the brain through the auditory center. Psychoacoustics, as art and science, allows technology to create sounds that can either fool the brain into false perceptions of its environment or cause the brain to react on a subconscious level to what the ears perceive. Examples include the shudders in the limbs and torso when chalk scrapes across a blackboard, the feeling of awe when in the presence of a church organ playing bass pedal tones, or (somewhat more obscurely) the use of time delay and frequency equalization to fool the brain into believing that the body is in a different environment than it really is, like a cavern or cathedral, or even that sonic events are occurring *inside the listener's head*. But an area of psychoacoustics that has never been explored in any depth is that of, um, well, um, sexual stimulus. Can sound directly induce orgasm? There, I've said it. Flame away if you please, but it's a question that won't go away. Ten years ago, Craig Huxley gave a concert featuring, among other things, a homemade instrument called the Blaster Beam. The Beam can be heard on the soundtrack to STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE (Vger's signature sound effect) and on several New Age albums. It's an amazing instrument, especially when amplified to high levels. The rumor circulating around after the concert was that when Huxley played the Beam, there were women in the audience falling out of their chairs with BIG smiles on their faces. Over a dozen reported having intensely sexual feelings from the Beam sound, up to and including orgasm. I personally took the whole idea with about four point two billion grains of salt, and never gave it much thought, until fairly recently. A young lady who was a dear friend of mine in high school, whom I hadn't seen in several years, came over for a visit, and was amazed at my studio (I hadn't gotten involved in music until after we'd stopped dating). She asked me to demonstrate what my stuff could do, and so I fired up a couple of synths and played her some snatches. But when, in flipping through my Xpander presets, I came to a sound called "THE BEAM" in honor of Huxley's instrument, the expression on her face abruptly changed. When I asked her what was wrong, she blinked for a moment and said, "Please play that again. Louder." I did so, and had the odd experience of watching her eyes glaze over as she half fell into a chair breathing hard. "I...*like* that sound," she managed to get out in a whisper. Nobody else I've played that patch for, including my fiancee (alas!), has had such a strong reaction to it, or indeed any reaction at all. But my curiosity is piqued. (wouldn't YOURS be?!) So my questions are as follows: 1. On rec.music.synth: As players and sound modellers, has anyone gotten any sort of feedback of this type from certain timbres? Better yet, does anyone have any idea of what QUALITY in the sound, from a scientifically reproducible standpoint, might produce these effects? My own theory is that heavy emphasis on low frequencies and a certain set of higher harmonics seem to do the job, but I can't test it on my friend in any structured manner as it wouldn't be fair to my fiancee. 2. On alt.sex: Has anyone ever experienced intensely sexual reactions to music or sound of any kind? The heavy rhythm in dance clubs, the sound of certain musical instruments, anything? Has this effect been reproducible? Has it been consistent from person to person, or do some people feel it more strongly than others? And so on. Please Email me with your responses, particularly if you're shy about them; I'll digest and post my findings, edited for confidentiality unless posters specifically say they want to be mentioned. I *know* this is a really weird concept, but like I said....if it had happened to *you*, wouldn't it be worth checking out? ***** [the first progress report, as posted] Hello to all interested alt.sex and rec.music.synth readers out there on the Net! Welcome to the first progress report on what I've modestly dubbed Project SyntheSex(TM), the first organized (well, sort of organized) effort to isolate synthetic or other sounds that are capable of direct stimulation of the human libido on a subconscious level. The purpose of these Progress reports is to report on interim results to the Net, to organize and guide any explorations of these ideas, and to pose new problems and questions to the Net. First, a few ground rules: 1. All replies to these posts should be via Email if at ALL possible; I'd prefer to keep this stuff off the Net until I can compact it and, if necessary, separate it out for two different audiences: unless I hear otherwise, I'm not going to post any detailed synth patch information or technical jargon to alt. sex, and I'm going to keep graphic descriptions of positive test results off of rec.music.synth, thereby preserving the basic rules of Netiquette at a loss of some extra bandwidth on the two bboards. I would rather not risk breaking any rules or offending anyone (see below). 2. This post was originally a semi-flippant one, but it has generated a LOT of interest (my account's mail file quota almost buckled under the mail I received), and so I've decided to handle it in the most professional way possible. I wish to make it clear that while I can not and will not obstruct any experiments using these ideas between consenting adults, I will NOT take responsibility for the misuse of any information presented here. Sex and music are both a lot of fun; they can also be serious business, and people can get hurt in either. PLEASE BE MATURE AND CAREFUL! 3. It's damned near impossible to do something like this in a scientific and controlled manner; the most I can do is to collect, sift through, and pass along information. I'm not claiming any sort of authority or control over this area; we're exploring very new territory here. If anyone in either newsgroup is offended by what transpires here, I must ask that they contact me DIRECTLY. The alt.sex bboard recently suffered a nightmarish turn of events when someone took offense to a poster's material and reported directly to that poster's mail coordinator, nearly resulting in said poster's total loss of Net privileges. This kind of stuff scares the pants off me, and I'd rather not have myself dragged to the chopping block for doing this. If it sounds like I'm issuing a blanket disclaimer here, I *am*. I'm just doing my best to deal with the large volume of responses I've gotten so far, and I'd like to avoid getting mired in unpleasantries. Okay? Now then: 1. ON REQUESTS FOR POSTINGS OF THE SYNTH PATCH IN QUESTION: I will be posting (at least to .synth) the patch that caused the strong reaction in my one test subject, along with details on treatment and amplification. I wish to correct an earlier statement: the patch that caused the reaction was NOT the factory patch known as "THE BEAM" at all, but rather was a patch of my own design called "THE IRE." I'm sorry for any confusion this may have caused; I was quoting from memory, and I made an incorrect mental connection between the real Beam's effect and the Oberheim BEAM sound. My apologies. 2. ON REQUESTS FOR MUSIC TITLES CONTAINING BEAM SOUNDS: There is a New Age label that carries music by Craig Huxley and Michael Stearns, both of whom use the original Blaster Beam extensively. I do NOT know the name of this label, nor of any particular albums that are heavy on the Beam. PLEASE send me any information you have on these albums! I will also assemble a list of artists and albums/songs tyhat have already been suggested, with notes on the effects they apparently have and possible reasons for those effects. 3. ON REQUESTS FOR FURTHER CROSSPOSTS: No, we do *NOT* need to drag alt.emusic and/or talk.bizarre into this! Nor do I take the suggestions that the Beam's appearance in the STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE soundtrack makes it *obvious* that we must crosspost to rec.arts.startrek terribly seriously. We're going to be generating enough bandwidth as it is, folx. Let's not get ridiculous. (Or should I say, any more ridiculous than we've gotten already?) 4. ON REQUESTS FOR RECORDED EXAMPLES OF THE SOUNDS I'VE USED: Don't send me any tapes yet, and please please PLEASE don't offer money! That's illegal and could cost me my job! I'll do all I can to help, but I have yet to determine if what makes these sounds so effective can even be caught by recording media. So please, make requests for samples or tapes if you must, but bear with me. And that's it for our first Progress Report: we're up and running! Please Email rather than post your reactions, don't get carried away by all this, and give me time to organize and collate, and we'll hopefully discover something worthwhile without blowing up too much bandwidth and/or offending or boring too many people. ***** [report posted prior to #2] Project SyntheSex Progress Report #2 will be on the Net before the end of this week. If you want your name associated with stuff you've sent me, please send me a note as soon as possible. I'm not going to include any names or Email addresses of any contributor except at their request. If this is unsatis- factory to you, I'll be happy to put in your name in place of ("anonymous") to acknowledge your input. Included will be excerpts from the mail and posts I've gotten so far, the infamous "IRE" Xpander patch, and my comments and questions on the material. I have decided NOT to split the progress reports into two parts; the .synth techie stuff will be easy to skip over, and there have been no .sex contributions too juicy to publish in .synth, alas |->. This report will be heavily edited; not for censorship purposes, but to distill the important comments and questions from the usual "Heyhowaya" stuff. I'd like to thank all contributors so far for the 2000-plus lines of stuff they've sent in. Now we're cookin'! ***** [the one exchange that wasn't in a progress report] In article <18090@srcsip.UUCP>, mnkonar@gorby.SRC.Honeywell.COM (Murat N. Konar ) writes: > In article <16398@cisunx.UUCP> mpmst1@cisunx.UUCP (metlay) writes: > >I came to a sound called "THE BEAM" in honor of Huxley's instrument, the > >[...] > >reaction at all. But my curiosity is piqued. (wouldn't YOURS be?!) > It is!! Post the patch to .synth and let's conduct some research! OK, but keep in mind two things: 1. The patch is copyrighted by Oberheim...it's one of their old factory patches and I don't think I've modified it any. 2. I claim no responsibility for ANYTHING (good or bad) that comes out of any "research" on this topic....|-> I'll dig up the patch, and post it in a human-readable format for Xpander and Matrix 12 users (with suggestions for Matrix 6/6R/1000 users if the smaller synths' architecture allows it) as soon as possible. It may take a while.... ***** [The second report, as posted] Hi gang! Well, here's the first crop of responses, some from the Net, most from email. I've edited them for brevity and anonymity, and inserted comments in [square brackets] where needed. They're grouped in approximately the following order: 1. Requests for sounds or albums with sounds, and suggestions for stuff that has been erotically inspiring; these are of interest for their own merits, but are subjective artistic opinions rather than indications of direct sub- conscious stimulation. And STILL no Beam albums! 2. Requests for porting the sound to tape, sample, other synth, etc etc. I've posted the Xpander patch below, and I doubt that it can be sampled or re- created on another synth; the architecture of the Xpander is very complex, and this sound, though it doesn't strain the Xpander's limits at all, is simply impossible on a simpler instrument. Sorry. As for sampling, well, the sound takes up to three minutes to take effect, and can't be looped. The last alternative is taping, and I believe that analog methods would saturate badly before capturing the power of the sound, and haven't the time or energy to try it with analog OR digital. Any volunteers with Xpanders and tape decks? 3. Personal experiences in studying this type of phenomena. These are mixed together haphazardly, and I haven't interjected many comments. Each could easily spawn its own discussion, particularly the question of resonances, which I feel is a vital part of my Xpander sound. 4. Potpourri and commentary, and the long-awaited IRE patch, are at the end. The patch IS copyrighted, by the way, so please don't try to sell it (tho you can trade it around all you want). Ready? Here we go! ***** Returned from an overseas trip a coupla days ago, logged on to catch up on the latest .synth news, and what do I see? Metlay leading a discussion on erotic patches! Gee, all the good stuff happens when I'm away. . . It's certainly an evocative subject. Like many men, I spend a good chunk of my waking (and sleeping, probably, for all I know) life contemplating female sexuality, and given my interest in electronic music, the question of sound as an aphrodisiac is one I've obviously devoted consisiderable thought to. I can say with certainty (alas!) that I have never induced 'gasms in women simply from playing sounds or music, but there is no question that cer- tain types of sounds have stimulated various women I know when I've played them (the sounds, not the women). I've always been aware that certain types of music will get women (and men too, of course, though I think that women are definitely more sexually responsive to sound than men) "into the mood." The second side of the Isley Bros. "Fight The Power" always did the trick for me in college. But sound actually inducing orgasm. . . I don't know. Oh, another record just came to mind: Miles's "Kind of Blue." Works every time. But this is music, of course, not an isolated patch. To really attack the subject you've raised, you have to make sure that cultural factors are sifted out and don't corrupt the equation. For example, I think that "Kind of Blue" is sexy to women because of the atmosphere it evokes- dim red lights, smoky (cannabis-soaked) air, late night people, etc.- rather than for any purely bioacoustic reason. On the other hand, there is no question that there is a reason that that kind of music developed in that atmosphere. It's almost a chicken-egg thing, but in any case, it's clear that it becomes self-reinforcing. (I hope this makes sense- I'm still badly jet- lagged and don't feel terribly coherent.) Anyway, it's a pretty complex issue. Hard to imagine that you'll solve anything, but I look forward to your Progress Report. ***** Track 2 of Brian Eno's "Music for Airports" has rather extreme effects on me, from the first time I heard it. No associations with anything or anyone that ever happened to me, or anything... just, well, it gets a response. Every time. Whew. I can't even play it anymore... Someday (hopefully soon) when 'opportunity knocks' (and opportunity seems to have lost my address for now, let me tell you... ;-) ) I'll see what it's like for music to boink by... but for now I just can't even listen to it. ***** I always find that certain sounds make me feel good generally, but only in a few cases do they arouse me. I like bass sounds in general, and examples such as Herbie Hancock's Headhunters in particular. I like the sound of barrel-house piano and saxophone a lot; a friend of mine once summed it up by saying "I can forgive anything in a song if it has a good sax solo". I do find Steely Dan's FM arousing. I have long been fond of certain classical "synthesiser-sounding" sounds, as in Billy Preston's Space Race or at the start of Stevie Wonder's Boogie On, Reggae Woman. I think you may be on to something here. ***** If you really ARE serious: My girlfriend is strongly affected (nudge nudge wink wink) by the third or fourth passage on the album "Oxygene" by Jean Michel Jarre. It starts with a swelling spaceship sort of sound and then goes into a jerky synth line (only vaguely) similar to the famous lick from "Tubular Bells" by Mike Oldfield. The sound for that line is a real clear, nearly sine wave sound. If you aren't serious....oh well. It's a chance worth taking, eh? ***** Do you know of any available CDs with "Blaster Beam" sounds? I'd be willing to check out the effect. (Have a close friend who responds very favorably to Kitaro.) We borrowed a friend's condo at Seven Springs last winter for a week. Among her CD collection were half a dozen by Kitaro, plus Lanz & Speer's "Desert Visions", "Natural States"; Acoustic Alchemy's "Red Dust and Spanish Lace"; Liona Boyd's "Persona"; Osamu's "Passages"; McLaughlin/DiMeola/DeLucia's "Passion, Grace, and Fire" We enjoyed all, but especially Kitaro (favorite is ASIA). This was our first introduction to Kitaro, and the response was intense and mutual. I couldn't really say if it was the sound or something hidden in the sound, but that isn't really significant to me. We have a very intense, sensual relationship, with an appreciation for wine, brie, French bread, fruit, warm rain, beaches, summer nights, suntans, long lazy days... I'm not looking for an aphrodisiac to CHANGE someone's mind, just enhancements to an already fantastic mood. So: a) if you haven't tried Kitaro, please try his "Asia" album/CD, and let me know if there is a similar response (may still be significant to your research) b) any additional leads/feedback on Blaster Beam would be appreciated (any word from Paul at Lost Horizon?) - when we get a chance to try it, I'll let you know what we think about it. DISCLAIMERS: a) the writer assumes no responsibility for any events arising [sic] from the above suggestions b) I know nothing about keyboards/synthesizers, etc., so technical discussions/suggestions about same will be lost on me - CDs I can understand. ***** Hi there. I found your article most interesting, and would love to test out the sounds on a larger sample. I am a student at Yale university and am sure that I could find a bunch of people to test out your hypothesis. I would pay you if I could send you a tape for you to make a copy of some of those sounds on. Let me know if this is feasible... ***** Can you describe that patch in objective Xpander terms (is it a simple VCO-->VCF-->VCA thing, or is it something unique to Matrix Modulation?)? [It's hard to describe; it is VCO-VCF-VCA-VCA, as are most Xpander patches, but the modules are controlled by a sampling LFO and a Lag processor, which no other synth has.] I don't own an Xpander (or Matrix-anything), but this idea which you present is something which I have pondered occasionally but dismissed as too far-fetched to be realistic. How closely does that patch resemble the original trademark sound? I am dying to hear this sound to see what this fuss is about. Is it on any records in isolated form? Do you have an Emax nearby into which you could sample that patch? ***** I have a Casio CZ-101. Is it possible for me to make the 'beam'? Also, I am just curious, how can I get a tape of this sound? Will it be accurately recorded on tap? ***** Other question- I have acces to a Matrix-6. Are Xpander patches compatible with it? If so, could you send me a copy of you The Blast? Sounds like a *verrry* interesting patch. If not, could you tell me where I might find a recording of this sound? I'd like to try it out on a class... [This person teaches an electronic music class, so banish all of those sleazy thoughts of coeds in a Phys Ed class suddenly going out of control when the instructor starts a new workout tape from your heads, folx. |-> ] ***** As an aside topic, what were the technical details behind this "Blaster Beam." Sounds interesting. I will have to hear the patch sometime. (Maybe I go dig out Star Trek: TMP and fast forward to V'ger.) ***** I've heard you're a matrix maniac, but this is taking it too far. :-) [There is no such thing as "too far." Trust me. ] Seriously, (or maybe not entirely seriously), could you do a FFT on the patch, and post? I guess we'd all like to try it out :-> [Yeah, I'll bet. Do you have a one-minute-plus FFT capability?] ***** I would be interested in porting that patch over to a polaris, if you'd be willing to work with me on the subject. I could even test this out on a live audience and see what percentage responds...(I have a gig coming up soon< and this sounds just too tempting). AT least, put me on whatever distribution list you have for this experiment. You have definately perked my curiosity. [ I asked him if a generic sound description would help:] YES. Publish a generic description, but more importantly you need to do the following... 1) Isolate those sound components which are absolutely necessary to create the effect [How? I'm open to suggestions.] 2) TRY THE SOUND ON A FEW OTHER WOMEN. [Do you have anyone in particular in mind? *I* sure don't, and I've only had one volunteer so far.] Don't worry about time, we've got the rest of our lives, right? [I only wish.] ***** Ive been reading the stuff in alt.sex about the "synthsex" phenomenon (?) and I am very interested, as the subject is fascinating (!!), and I'm hoping you can help me on one or two points here... I know little about synthesizers, and cannot even recieve rec.music.synth, but would like to know exactly what machines the patch can be adapted to... A friend of mine has a lot of equipment ( he keeps a Korg M1 Music Workstation in his bedroom here at university... ) and he may be able to cobble something up on something of his. I do not know if this is feasible and I'm wondering if you can let me know whether it is, or not, from roughly what I've said, Or what equipment he'd need, if I'm talking gibberish!! [The M1 is a beautiful sounding synth, but it uses digital samples and can't control them in the fashion the IRE requires. But I'd be pleased to be proven wrong....] Re song titles, I would indeed like to know what some titles/albums are that are heavy in the appropriate sounds, and perhaps which tracks/rough posn if you have that info for isolation... But maybe you'd need a high-frqequency response tape to catch necessary sub-harmonics? i dont know!! Have you had any feedback on whether any effects have been felt from a tape?!! You also only mention t he female aspect of this situation. Is there a corresponding male aspect to be seen anywhere? or havent you heard anything like that?! As for requests for taped samples, I feel I would like very much to make a request for any possible sample you could obtain from your "IRE" instrument. I dont know how you'd feel about this. I only ask this (wrt disclaims) in the unlikely case you are legally and financially able to do this. If so, then I would very much like a copy of the IRE sample. If you are not, then I'm just gonna have to live with it, aren't I ?!! [see below.] ***** Oh, and another point which belongs in the other thread: I am no biologist, but thinking back, it would seem to me a directly induced orgasm would be physically impossible. You see, I was under the impression that orgasm could NOT occur without following the normal arousal curve. Of course, ANY kind of stimulation could contribute to sexual pleasure, but only after arousal. A couple of years ago I did some quick personal research into the possibility of directly affecting the brain with electromagnetic fields. Some work has been done in this area. The interests are wide and varied- the military wants to fry them, the doctors want to heal them, and the entrepeneurs want to stimulate them. Suffice it to say that, despite the sensitive nature of the research (and difficulty in obtaining laboratory animals for this type of thing), my conclusion is that the brain CAN be directly affected by electromagnetic radiation. Experiments have resulted in everything from wild stimulation to instant death in laboratory animals. There were no human experiments (at least none that produced data I had access to- I think the defense research interest here has been well kept) and they did not outright say that orgasm could be directly produced by electromagnetic stimulation, but they definitely implied it. Anyway, the main point is the nature of these experiments. First of all, results are totall non-reproducible. These setups included all kinds of wierd coil arrays and oscillator/sweeper/randomizer drivers. It seems that every subject reacts differently. It was posited that brain/mind "designs" just vary too much. If such equipment will ever be controllable, it will probably have to be custom designed for each individual user. Could it be that the electromagnetic interactions within the Xpander, speaker coils, etc. during THE BEAM waveform just happen to be right for stimulating the sexual centers in the brain in certain people (women apparently)? If so, the Xpander would be the perfect party centerpiece!! :-) [I keep mine running, under my bed, thanks. I prefer *quiet* parties.] Or is it possible that the sound itself has something to do with it, which seems more likely, physically at least? It has long been known that both audio and photonic stimulation can cause the brain to "go into" one of the regular waves (delta, alpha, etc.) Again, the "tuning" is different for everyone and the results (most consciously notable are the alpha wave) often include profound relaxation. It is also well known that audio and photonic stimulation can cause major and minor epileptic seizures. Although I have NO support for this theory, let me suggest that it might cause a very minor epileptic-like seizure in someone not even diagnosed as an epileptic and be experienced as overwhelming pleasure. Theories aside, I personally don't think something as dramatic as an orgasm could ever be obtained in such uncontrolled conditions. Personally, I have NEVER felt a connection between music and sex. Even with music which people claim "is great for making love to," I see no difference with any other type of music. Granted, music can contain romantic themes, or "driving" rhythms, but I don't see any direct connection. Anyway, it is an interesting prospect, to say the least... ***** I was once thinking about looking at neurophysiological correlates of acoustic stimulation for my doctoral thesis. One of the things that came up was sexual response. I'll elaborate when I know that the mail is getting to you. [Well, John, it is, but I couldn't reach you to tell you that!] ***** I am considering doing an honors thesis soon in psychoacoustics and related musical issues, so the questions you've raised have become of considerable interest to me. Would it be too much to ask if I could get a copy of the correspondence you are receiving on the subject of the "beam" sound and what it can do? Ideally, I'd love to do some field research (no innuendoes intended), but you seem to have started the ball rolling on your end. At any rate, I'm very interested in whatever you uncover...please forward to me anything you deem interesting pertaining to the subject at hand. [I gave him my usual disclaimers of responsibility etc] I understand...I'm basically looking for a springboard, something to get me researching in the right direction. The expander patch would help, for starters...or even better, a tape of the sound it makes, so I can run it through the spectrum resynthesizer on the Synclavier II here at school...then I can model other sounds on it and conduct controlled experimentation tageting elicited responses to the sound. I appreciate anything you can send to me. ***** Are you sure your friend didn't recognize the sound as the Beam and decide to play a little trick on you? [Nope, she wouldn't rrecognize the BEAM from a hole in the ground.] If not, then well hey; I'm over at CMU and I'd be willing to come by and listen to the patch sometime :-) ... I must admit, though, I'd probably feel more comfortable listening to the sound in the privacy of my own home from a tape or something-- does it lose its interesting ability when recorded? I don't know how I'd deal with reacting or not reacting in front of someone I don't know. ***** In article <16398@cisunx.UUCP> mpmst1@cisunx.UUCP (metlay) writes: >I'm an electronic musician whose opinions are (much too) well-known... Is this a straight line or what??... >...some snatches. REALLY Metlay..... >So my questions are as follows: Hey, I gotta few questions of my OWN! How the hell do I get this SOUND! How about posting a patch! I suppose I could sample it from the soundtrack or the video tape.....HMMMMMMMmmmmmm. Now I gotta admit I have used my studio as an, errr, incentive to intrigue a young lady into visiting my lair, er, I mean, my house, ("Common over to my Studio, baby, and check out my....instruments..."wink wink nudge nudge), and as good as I think my music is (I do use bass pedals yaknow), I have yet (to my knowledge anyway) been able to induce orgasam before sex! COME to think of it, it may be best to play some SNATCHES to get them almost "there", then pounce! Yeah, thats the ticket.... Now we know Metlay what your "day" job is....writing letters for Penthouse magazine.... ("Oh baby! A minor! Again! Please!!......oh!...oh!....OOOHHHH!!!") ;^) [This is funny. Very, very funny. Heh. Do they REALLY pay people for that?] No really, seriously...I think what we have here is that in this particular case, you just happen to find the resonate frequency of...er....a critical piece of anatomy. Perhaps you could narrow down your research to finding another test cases resonate point. If you explore this avenue, let us know how it comes out. (In other words, that Xpander is one expensive vibrator!....) Yes...and that Ayatollah is one tough literary critic! ;^) ***** [the above sparked the following Net dialogue:] >> (In other words, that Xpander is one expensive vibrator!....) > Quite unlikely. Although it is possible that the effect coulr be due to > actual physical stimulation, it is very improbable given the anatomy. In > order to get actual vibration of the magnitude which we would be talking > about here, it would almost certainly be necessary for the acoustic stimulus > to be physically coupled with skin. I have to disagree. While playing my synths quite recently I noticed that a certain frequency would resonate with something in my abdomen. I'm using my boom box as an amp and the thing only has 4" (diameter) speakers, so we're not talking about extremes in volume here. And, no, I wasn't sitting on the speakers. :-) ***** By the way, this doesn't really apply directly to the question of orgasm- inducing sounds, but I knew a female bass player who was fond of sitting upon her speaker cabinet whilst playing. Obviously there was a more direct connection in that case... [So who cleaned the speaker cabinets after the shows? |-> ] ***** I personally havent had or no anyone who has (at least admitted to having ) a simulus while hearing music though i once was in a group who were talking to a catholic priest (a guy in his late 20s) seemly he had looked into the subject of music in disco and other forms and claimed that certain companies backtrack there records with sonic frequencies that create sexual emotions in the listeners .He also claimed that he read that these vibrations were heightened if the resonated through wood such as oak an simular materials used in concert halls ,etc though generally any hard wood that causes resonance. Hope thats what you maybe interested in. [Yep, it is. But keep it away from Brother Jed and Sister Patty; they might actually end up enjoying themselves for once! |-> ] ***** Mike, You are a mad scientist. Keep up the good work. [How very kind. Thank you!] I am inclined to believe the woman you mentioned was turned on by your presence in the room, or perhaps a combination of the sound and your presence. I would be very surprised if the woman was as turned on by a sequencer playing the same sound without your presence in the room. Of course now that she has experienced the sound in your presence and became exited, we can never know. If she were to respond now to the sequencer controlled sound in an empty room, it might just be triggering her memory of the previous experience. I do have a personal story that may or may not be relevant. My lover and I were standing in the doorway of my home on an early summer's evening watching an approaching thunderstorm through the large glass of the door. It started raining and the thunder was getting louder. Within 5 minutes the lightning was *very* close, flashing brilliantly in front of us with almost simultaneous thunder cracks at near deafening levels. The kind of sound that rattles your chest when it hits you. Nature was putting on quite a show for us and the "sound track" was one of the best. I turned to look at my friend/lover and noticed she was trembling slightly in a way that I knew well. What had turned her on? Did the sound of the thunder excite her? Did my presence have an effect? Was the storm's overall power an effect? Was it just her imagination? Was it just mine? [Having made passionate love in a thunderstorm on a football field in my misspent youth, I hardly think it was just your imagination. Thunder has a lot of low frequency sound pressure...this may be part of the key to what we're looking for.] There really isn't any way to answer these questions. What people feel just happens. Sure, there are some loosely defined cause and effect, but it is *very* difficult to be all that scientific about this. Good luck in your inquiry. You have certainly caught the attention and piqued the curiosity of many, myself included. ***** I find it a rather interesting subject though I am extremely dubious. You might also want to analyse those tapes that companies sell claiming suggestive capabilities. I've seen them advertised in Penthouse. I can dig up a reference for it if you like, I.E. Xerox the ad. [I have my doubts about these; subliminal speech seems too much like homeopathy to my tastes.] ***** I have a patch on my JP-6 that I call "Titanic Bluebirds" that has on more than one occasion seemed to stimulate women when I've played it (though I have to play it in a pattern of sorts; a single "note" doesn't do the trick). Des- cribing it is kind of difficult- I guess I would say that it is a sort of mellow twittering. I can send the parameters if you want. I myself don't find it particularly exciting, but what the hey: to each his/her own. ***** I noticed that playing really low sine waves give me a great pressure or tension. The setup is an old DX-7 going right into an AKG 240-DF studio monitor headphones. (obnoxious high frequency noise from the '7, of course) The best note for it is around c or e right above the low frequency threshold of my hearing. The note is about 41 Hz or so. Maybe a little less. I feel the pressure in my chest, along with an anxiety and something which makes me think I'd be screaming if I heard it for a long time at reasonable levels. The first time I did it, releasing the key was one of the greatest reliefs I have ever felt. Like the largest person you know getting up off your chest. Now, that doesn't exactly have anything to do with sex, but it is real easy and gets at deep simpler emotions. Toss in overtones and it gets complicated, but the human mind seems to do a lot with overtones, and with emotional communication, so I think that there is stuff there to be discovered. I've only tried to get one of my roommates to do it, but he is about as sensitive as a dead elephant to that kind of stuff. With me, the effect varies. Tonight, I have found a frequency which is just givint me a headache -- it's a higher frequency one. You have to play about with the pitch bend wheel to find the frequency where effects are strongest. Try bending thru different pitches while trying to feel where you are affected. Compare going up a couple of octaves thru 40 hz with going downwards. I'll try to get my other roommate to try it. He's a psychology student, and might even have some ideas or something. ***** Depends on the frequency range you're talking about. When I took one of several audio courses in college, the prof mentioned that alot of research was being done in the late 1960's on the affects of amplified CWs on humans (as a function of frequency). It was discovered that at 7 to 9 Hertz, with the proper amplification, the human bowel would resonate, causing the subject to loose ALL control. It seems that the police were intrested in using this technique as a means of crowd control during the anti-war demonstrations. The idea was to blast the crowd, watch for the expressions on their faces that you knew would be there, have a good laugh, and watch them run for it. Demonstration over. The big bug-a-boo was that the police down in the crowd would also be affected in the same way. Hence, idea abandoned. ***** [My opinion of K*te B*sh and her music/image/fans, combined with my new .sig, got some interesting responses; too bad I can't print any of them without offending the .gaffaheads who read these bboards. Some were fairly mild, like requests to test the IRE on K*te; others were, um, less subtle. Use your imaginations...I've deleted them all.] ***** And last but not least, folx, here it is, the item you've all been waiting for: THE IRE by Metlay (not THE BEAM factory patch, I'm afraid; mistaken identity) [This patch is listed in a modified text format similar to the one used in XPANSIONS!, the Xpander Users' Group newsletter. It should be self-explanatory; use no pages not explicitly listed below, and all parameter values not given are either OBERHEIM store/clear initialization patch defaults and/or simply unimportant.] VCO1 freq=14,detune=0,PW=31,vol=63. P.2: [underline only] LAG, PULSE. FREQ MOD: ENV1/+63, ENV1/+63 VCO2 freq=12,detune=0,PW=31,vol=63. P.2: LAG,PULSE. FREQ MOD: ENV3/-63, ENV3/-63. VCF/VCA freq=108,res=63,mode=2 pole lowpass,VCA1=0,VCA2=0. P.2: (none) VCF FREQ MOD: LFO1/+35. VCA1 AMP MOD: PED1/+4. VCA2 AMP MOD: ENV2/+63, LAG/+63. FM/LAG fm amp=63,fm dest=VCF,lag in=PED2,lag rate=58. P.2: EXPO. FM AMP MOD: ENV1/+45. ENV1 d=0,a=0,d=0,s=63,r=44,amp=63. P.2: FREERUN,SINGLE. ENV2 d=0,a=0,d=0,s=63,r=63,amp=63. P.2: FREERUN,SINGLE. ENV3 d=0,a=0,d=0,s=63,r=63,amp=63. P.2: SINGLE. LFO1 speed=36,wave=sample kybd,retrig=OFF,amp=63. P.2: OFF. AMP MOD: LEV2/-63. TRACKING GENERATORS, RAMP GENERATORS, ENV4+5, LFO2-5: not used. COMMENTS: This patch is essentially a resonant ring modulation sound, with the evolution of the sound controlled by the envelopes smeared out over time by the lag processor. The interaction of the various pages is a bit bizarre, but I can offer a few pointers on using it: First and foremost, PED1 on VCA1 acts as a volume control. The maximum volume allowed is 4 out of the control's total range of 63. DO NOT EXCEED THIS! I've been known for flip comments in the past, but if I've *ever* been serious on the Net, I am now. This patch is DANGEROUS at high volumes; it creates runaway filter oscillation that can easily shred speaker cones and permanently damage hearing. The last time this patch was auditioned outside MysTech Studios was at Kurt Geisel's place; we had his Matrix 12 turned almost all the way down and the VCA1 level set to 4, and his woofers were rattling like they were about to burst. You should set the maximum allowed volume to your system's tolerances, and do so starting from zero. And never, NEVER listen to this patch at high levels with headphones! I did once, and developed a nice little 3dB sensitivity rolloff in my left ear above 10k to show for it, for about a week and a half. My ears recovered, which according to my audiologist was nothing short of a miracle, but you may not be so lucky. Second, you should audition the sound only through solid speakers with plenty of headroom and as wide a frequency response as possible (I recommend woofers from bass guitar cabinets for the low end), and use the loudest level that doesn't cause the ears to tickle or ring, which indicates incipient damage. Sound pressure levels seem to play an important part in producing the desired effect, and one must walk a fine line between sound that's too soft to have an effect and too loud for safety. Third, the best playing technique is as follows. Before touching the keys, depress PED2 and hold it. Then play either a tone cluster at the center of the keyboard range, or two clusters at the high and low ends. Hold the notes for anywhere from 30 to 45 seconds; it'll take that long for the Lag processor to take keyboard control away from you. You can then let go of some or all keys, experiment with LEV2 (not a very dramatic effect), play and hold different notes, etc. Releasing PED2 begins the process of shutting down the sound; if you release the pedal and all held notes, this will take up to two minutes. In my experience, my lady friend began to look strange at about 45 to 60 seconds and was breathing hard in 2 to 3 minutes. (Your mileage may vary. |-> ) If you're impatient, lower the LAG RATE to 56 or 55, but much lower than that and the character of the sound's evolution changes drastically. Last but not least, I don't know what people are expecting from this sound, but I will say this much: it's not exactly musical in the traditional sense. It has a lot of power and kick, and will probably find its way into my next album (due out next year) if only to reach a wider sample of possibly easily- stimulated listeners, nyuk nyuk, but it ain't exactly a harpsichord. (OR a Conrail locomotive, for that matter. |->) Enjoy....if you can! ***** The next report will probably be a lot smaller, as it'll include followup and maybe even wrapup reports, as I'd prefer not beating this topic to death. Keep those cards and letters coming! And have a little patience; between the XUG, my upcoming wedding, my music, and, oh yes, *work*, I'm awfully busy. So personal answers to SyntheSex queries may be slow or nonexistent, and I just CAN'T send people tapes of the IRE, or anything else for that matter. (Unless you want a copy of my first album, plug plug |-> ) See you next time, and until then, remember to play safe: demagnetize your tape deck heads regularly, make disc backups of everything, and if you're not 100% sure, ALWAYS use a rubber--wrap it in foil before checking her oil. Ciao! ***** [the third and last posting] Well, the discussion has slowed to a trickle, and that's okay: no sense beating a dead horse. People on rec.music.synth have turned their attention to IBM-AT interfacing, and alt.sex seems preoccupied with the ethical question of some guy losing his account for posting an offensive article to the Net. All things must pass, I guess. Anyway, enough nostalgia; there are a couple of last threads that have come up, and the first set spells the tone of where this discussion seems to have ended up. So: ***** > Project SyntheSex(TM): Where the listener comes first. |-> This is a sick puppy. [This was from a friend of mine who reads alt.sex. Nice to have friends!] ***** Metlay, I shared your original posting with a friend of mine. Her opinion from a woman's point of view: "for whatever motive, she was probably faking it" hope this doesn't burst your bubble... [I find this unlikely, for reasons I'd rather keep to myself. But you can believe what you want....] ***** [other responses to this possibility:] >Metlay, I shared your original posting with a friend of mine. Her opinion >from a woman's point of view: > > "for whatever motive, she was probably faking it" I showed several of the SynthSex(TM) postings to my girlfriend. Her response was something like: "Whether or not I have an orgasm has as much to do with the mood I'm in and the situation surrounding the stimulation. Rarely does physical stimulation alone do much for me. I think that it's the same for most other women, too." It sounds more to me like sounds & music make a good enhancement of sexual activity, but they rarely work by themselves. ***** >Metlay, I shared your original posting with a friend of mine. Her opinion >from a woman's point of view: > "for whatever motive, she was probably faking it" >hope this doesn't burst your bubble... Perhaps she should volunteer as a test subject in our sonic erotic experiment. ;-) "...er,...involuntary dilation of the eyes....." -Bladerunner ***** > research was being done in the late 1960's on the affects of amplified > CWs on humans (as a function of frequency). > It was discovered that at 7 to 9 Hertz, with the proper amplification, the > human bowel would resonate, causing the subject to loose ALL control. > The big bug-a-boo was that the police down in the crowd would also be > affected in the same way. Hence, idea abandoned. Back when the world was young, I read of this research and attemped to duplicate it using a British motorcycle which had two pistons moving exactly in phase, thus having an oscillating mass os a pound or so and an amplitude of nearly three inches, WAY more power than wold be available with electronic equipment. I was unable to produce resonance in my own (for sure) or anybody else's (to the best of my knowledge) orifices. 7 Hz is 420 RPM, a low but perfectly attainable rate. ***** [and one last bit of new data:] for what they're worth, I'd like to mention some related obsservations in the hope that they will contribute to the research 1) I've noticed some times when I'm getting ready to step into the shower all of a sudden I need to take a piss. Once or twice, this has also happened before washing my hands. It seems that perhaps the sound of running water is causing it (or is it the impending drop in temperature?) 2) Many mornings I wake up rather hard, but this seems to disappear almost immediately after using the toilet, leading me to notice a link between bladder pressure and arousal. Very similar were the times when I had to use the bathroom imediately after my then-girlfriend got me to come during oral sex. Maybe it's just me, but in the case that it's more general... What I'd like to suggest is that some of the trikling sounds that water makes (similar to showers or sink faucets) might cause the need to urinate, but in the nice, warm, dry (? |:-)) confines of the bed, one's brain may well reinterpret the urges to be of a more erotic nature, and thus have the sensual experiences enhanced. Just some thoughts; hope they give you some insight... ***** And that brings us to the end of report number 3, and to the end of Project SyntheSex(TM), at least as far as organized Net responses and digests go. The initial surge of interest has passed, and I'll keep a digest of all posts to send to anyone who came in too late to retrieve the stuff from their archives, but as of now I'm turning the tag-end of this discussion back to the Net: the bandwidth is manageable, and I no longer have time to pursue the topic in such great depth. I hope that I've accomplished at least part of what I set out to do: to encourage thought and discussion on this weird but fascinating topic. It may be that the synth/sex question will gain a new lease on life in open discussion, and if so, that's fine. But I've done my bit, and now it's time to get back to the more important stuff in life, both in matters synthetic (I have a new issue of XPANSIONS to write and an album to finish) and sexual (my RFL just bought a black velvet cocktail dress for a formal dinner tonight. Yum!). Thanx for all your attention and input. Play safe! ***** [various .sig files] -- metlay METLAY@PITTVMS.BITNET or metlay@vms.cis.pittsburgh.edu Xpander Users' Group: Email me for details. Metlay say: "Things could be worse. Things could ALWAYS be worse." -- metlay METLAY@PITTVMS.BITNET or metlay@vms.cis.pittsburgh.edu Xpander Users' Group: Email me for details. Metlay say: "There's enough wonder and joyous exploration in the world of music without Conrail locomotives and harpsichords. Just say NO." -- metlay METLAY@PITTVMS.BITNET or metlay@vms.cis.pittsburgh.edu Xpander Users' Group: Email me for details. Project SyntheSex(TM): Where the listener comes first. |-> "And they told us/All they wanted/Was a sound that would, um....." --K*te B*sh? ************* [I hope y'all enjoy this. It's archived by John Young, YOUNG@CTSTATEU.BITNET.] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Oct 89 14:19:00 EDT From: a Pirate twin Subject: Samplers ... Here I go again ... I have an Akai S950 sampler, with its worse than useless manual, and I wondering if any of you people have or have heard of alternate documentation on this unit, editor packages (for an IBM PC), etc. I've posted this request before, but I thought I'd repost in case anyone new to the list has/knows anything. Thanks ... -brian ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 20 Oct 89 13:03:00 EDT From: STEARNS@BIOVAX.BITNET Subject: w30 versus a mac-with-sampler .. Would anyone like to comment on the pros and cons of a Roland w30 workstation versus a combination of a Mac (plus or SE) and some Roland sampler? (S-30? D-50? -- sorry, I don't know the models well enough.) I wanted to combine live playing with editing diskettes to take into a studio as background tracks for voices. I wondered if the Mac/S-30 combination would give more bang for the bucks than would the w30 alone ... (Thinking of a w30 priced around $2500, a sampler maybe $1400.) Would a Mac-with-sampler give better editing power? Downloading patches from a disk takes @30 seconds on the w-30. If I wanted to drag the Mac along to gigs, could I have patches waiting on the Mac that would download to the keyboard more quickly than the w-30 allows? Mainly, what would I lose, using a Mac/sampler combination? What might I gain? Thanks for any and all comments -- Tim (the exhausted) Stearns STEARNS@BIOVAX, or stearns@biovax.rutgers.edu ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 20 Oct 89 13:20:06 EDT From: Joe McMahon Subject: Re: w30 versus a mac-with-sampler .. Well, with the Mac, you could get Alchemy or TuroSynth. I think Alchemy lets you dork around with samples. TurboSynth lets you build your own sample files digitally and download them to your sampler. I don't know how fast this is, or how well it works, but it's sure a neat idea. The few things I remember from the Keyboard article on this said you essentially dragged boxes into a window, which represented either samples or effects, and could combine them to form new samples. --- Joe M. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 20 Oct 89 15:22:00 EST From: METLAY@PITTVMS.BITNET Subject: On the W30 and other (kafk gak) workstations Tim: Go with the Mac and the sampler, no question. In the rush for the chic sophistication of the all-in-one workstation, users have forgotten what MIDI was really invented for, namely flexibility. In the year or two before MIDI was adopted, every instrument manufacturer was developing its own digital communications standard, and all of them were mutually exclusive. The motto: buy all of your gear from us, or suffer. MIDI blew the market wide open by allowing anyone to connect anything to anything else, and the proliferation of fascinating and worthwhile gear that would never have seen the light of day otherwise is a matter of record. Nowadays, though, in our era of "backwards is better," the hip thing to do seems to be stuffing everything one can into one box and saying, buy our all-in-one, or suffer. Huh? Did I miss something? Isn't this where we were six years ago? Hello? Well, enough philosophizing. Time for some instrument-specific piles'o' facts'n'opinions. The W30's advantages are easy to delineate. It's small, selfcontained, and sturdy. If you take it to a gig, your carrying and wiring hassles will be minimal. If it's ALL you own other than a pair of headphones, then you can work very well with it in your bedroom and be happy. In fact, if you own no other instruments or anything else, you're in good shape with it. Because it doesn't have to interface with anything, cooperate with anything, or function as a part of a larger system. No sweat. In fact, you'll have limited what you need to know to make music to the pages of one manual, which a lot of us wish for every now and then. But its disadvantages are equally easy to delineate, and they're all part and parcel of one big disadvantage that every workstation shares: it's a closed system, the antithesis of MIDI. If there's any part of it that you don't like, well, you're just out of luck. With a separate sampler and a Mac, you have the problems of wiring up the system, tweaking it, making sure your MIDI cables are hooked up, and getting the proper software and firmware to do what you want to do best. Now, let's be honest: those are major hassles, and the learning curve is steep. But you end up with the tremendous power of having your system hand-built and fine-tuned to the way YOU work. Don't like to edit your samples or synth setups on the tiny LCD? Get a librarian/editor package for the Mac. Want to sequence? Buy a sequencer package for it. And so on. But far, FAR more important than those examples are these: Want better sounds, or different sounds? Add another module. Your studio grows a bit, and the Mac handles the new arrival the way it handles everything else you have already. And the same goes for data massage or sound treatments. But on a workstation, you're locked in to X number of effects algorithms, Y number of polyphony/voice assignment options, and Z number of sounds. (Ha! I hear you say. Z equals infinity for the W30, because it's a sampler! Bah! I say. It's no easier to use than any other sampler module on the market, and [imho, damn it, imho] its sound quality is considerably inferior.) For the cost of a W30 and EVERYTHING you'll need to make it easy to work with (a screen, mouse, and sequencing/bulk dump software), you can get a Mac with an interface, a good sampler (like a Roland S-330, equivalent to the W30's guts, if you insist, though there are lots of better units out there), and the necessary software to make them work together, like a sample editor and a sequencer. But your sample editor will be easier to use and more powerful, your sequencer will be more flexible and compatible with other gear, and you can use your Mac for a lot of other things as well. It'll cost extra to get a drum machine, a multi-effector, and maybe a little line mixer and some cables, but the results will leave the W30, or any other workstation, in the dust. And when you upgrade, you'll be adding improvements to a generalized system rather than patching things onto the outside of the impenetrable workstation architecture. Those are my views; I work in the studio, mostly, and I insist on being able to mix analog, digital, and sampled sounds, rather than sampled analog, sampled digital, and sampled sampled sounds, with effects that nobody puts on workstations these days. Live work for me is rare and requires major moves, but the results are worth it. Your mileage may vary. good luck, metlay ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 20 Oct 89 16:41:00 EDT From: a Pirate twin Subject: RE: On the W30 and other (kafk gak) workstations >Tim: >Go with the Mac and the sampler, no question. >In the rush for the chic sophistication of the all-in-one workstation, >users have forgotten what MIDI was really invented for, namely flexibility. >metlay Yes! Someone who understands! I've had it with all these all-in-1 systems. Why don't they put their efforts into making better sound? Granted, some of the stuff out there sounds pretty good, but none of the "workstations" I've heard had it in all aspects ... to me, nothing beats the sounds you can get when you MIDI _different_ units together ... BTW, I'm one of those poor (house-poor, that is) players that can't afford a MAC ... but my PC XT clone (a.k.a. ol' reliable) is stuffed to the gills. Right now I'm looking for a program to edit samples. Any recommendations? -brian ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 20 Oct 89 17:33:00 EST From: METLAY@PITTVMS.BITNET Subject: RE: On the W30 and other (kafk gak) workstations Thanx brian. Nice to have someone agree with me now and then. *sigh* I can't recommend anything in particular for PCs. I don't own a computer at all. Food and rent, y'see. metlay ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Oct 89 11:36:54 PDT From: Mark Loomis Subject: Drum Machines I have heard some discussion about the TR-808 drum machine along the lines of "I'd pay $XYZ to get my hands on one of those" and "I wish I knew somebody that had one so I could at least sample it". I have never seen this unit - what is so totally ultimate about it? Isn't this the drum machine they use for rap music? Do they still make it and how much should a used one go for? Mark Loomis loomis@sun.com ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Oct 89 12:41:48 BST From: Tony Jewell Subject: Sequencers & Sixtraxs Can any one out there help me ? The one thing I need in my system at the moment is a multi-timbral ANALOGUE synth/expander. As far as I can see there are really only 2 options in my price range (about 250 pounds), either the Cheetah MS6 or a second hand Sequential Sixtrax. The Sixtrax seems perfect, sonically similar to the MS6 (both have Curtis chips), but the Sixtrax has seperate outputs, something which I really need (Why didn't they put them on the MS6 then my problems would be over !). However, I have heard some things about the Sequential's dodgy midi spec, i.e. its inablilty to sync to drum-machines (not a problem in my set up however). What I need to know is, though, will it works as a multi-timbral expander with my atari sequencer ? Does any one still use one out there who can share their experience ? Thanks, Tony Jewell ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 18 Oct 89 15:13:41 CST From: Jayson Tipp Subject: organ..piano? I looking for a portable, and roadworthy keyboard. I have an ESQ-1 which I like a great deal for both piano and organ patches. Especially the organ. Using the CV pedal to control modulation coupled with pedal controlled LFO modulating right to left panning, I can get a nice pseudo-rotary speaker effect. I recall that both Yamaha and Roland made organ-only keyboard boxes back awhile (5-10 yrs.). Does anyone know if they allowed the same time of effect. Alternatively, I seek a decent acoustic piano sound from a keyboard. As always a low price solution is preferred. Any suggestions? Thanks, -Buzz. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 18 Oct 89 17:19:03 EDT From: IO92394@MAINE.BITNET Subject: Recommendations Buzz, I have a Kawai K1 synth and love it. It's very light and is 8-voice multi-timbral. Try it; you'll love it! Rick Haseltine ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Oct 89 07:59:11 CDT From: Eddie Mikell Subject: Recommendations Buzz, Try a Korg piano module. I've listened to others, but this one is the best for the price (299). Eddie H. Mikell ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Oct 89 09:37:00 EDT From: a Pirate twin Subject: re: Korg Piano module Tell me more about this Korg Piano module ... model #?, does it just do acoustic, or does it have electric piano as well? ... how does it compare to the Roland RD series? -brian (always looking for the best piano sound, but I can't afford a Kurzwiel ...) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Oct 89 11:22:37 CST From: Jayson TIpp Subject: re: Korg Piano module I guess I was not very clear yesterday. I love my ESQ-1, but cannot play both the organ and piano sounds at the same time. I play mostly jazz and would like to comp on the organ while soloing on piano (sometimes vice-versa). I could split the board, but who knows where on the keys I'll solo. I like the Roland RD (?) series for piano, but I think they're more $$ than I want to spend. The second option is to get a nice organ-in-an-inexpensive box-that can-reproduce-B3s. I like using CV pedal control because both hands are free. The ESQ-1 because it's stereo can reproduce some nice rotary speaker sounds. Are there other inexpensive boxes that will. By the way, does anyone know the ins and outs about setting up a leslie for use with a synth? -Buzz. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Oct 89 13:27:04 CDT From: Eddie Mikell Subject: re: Korg Piano module Glad you asked. The modules is the Korg P3. You can buy other cards for it, but they are so so (I've heard the orchestra pit card is good, but the local dealer does not carry it). It's a rugged unit (it fell of my stand a few times during vigorous playing, but worked fine.). No electric piano exist, but the brass, organ, choir, strings, are as good as the M-1 samples. Eddie Mikell, the cheap keyboardist. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 20 Oct 89 10:12:00 EST From: DEFLAVIA@TMPLCIS.BITNET Subject: RE: re: Korg Piano module Hi Brian, Try the Korg P3. It has two grand piano samples: a 9' and a 6' respectively. It also has a slot for RAM cards and you can alter some of the parameters such as timbre, etc. It is an external module about the size of a cigar box (approx 7"x6"x1") with midi in-thru-out. It processes pressure and velocity signals and sounds tremendous. Give it a go! For about $400.00 you can't go wrong! Good luck Russ De Flavia - ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 20 Oct 89 11:23:00 EST From: DEFLAVIA@TMPLCIS.BITNET Subject: RE: The tape Hi, I know I am resonding to an old message, but since I have a lot of disk space, I can keep loads of messages around. Anyway, I am very interested in getting a copy of the "tape". As far as I know, all I need to do is send you a blank 90-minute cassette along with the postage required to send it back to me. Please let me know if there are any details that I should know, or anything I can do to make it most convenient for you. Since I am new on the list, I missed the cut-off to submit any compositions, but I intend to participate in the next compilation. Thanks for all you hard work--I know how much time you must have spent on the project--and all of the helpful advice that you and the other "regulars" offer. God bless you all! Russ De Flavia - (Please excuse the typos, I am on duty now (as a lab consultant) and there is no escape from students who always manage to come from behind and jolt you both with there questions and their presence.) ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Oct 89 22:13:12 EDT From: Cecilia Tan Subject: Re: TAPE NEARING COMPLETION YES, IT'S TRUE! The TAPE will be going out to all the contributors THIS week. I was hoping to get all the copies done at once, so that everyone would get a hold of them at more or less the same time, so we could discuss things together, but I the number of requests that have come in recently has made me see that I am just not going to get them all done that soon. I also realized--my god--it's OCTOBER and you must all be pretty anxious. One note thought--TDK 90 minute tapes are longer than Maxell 90 minute tapes. I know it is weird, but all you who sent Maxell (something like 75%) will be missing the last few measures of the last song on side one. Also, some of the tapes have a short bit of a song on the end of side 2 which shouldn't have been on there at all. Hope it isn't too bothersome. -ctan ---------------------- End of EMUSIC-L Digest **********************