My evil modular plans

[jbv]

I'm following that discussion about DSP development and
analog emulation for a couple of days, and am wondering
whether anyone here has heard or used the ISPW board
developed for the NeXT box at IRCAM (Paris) a few years ago ?
An extended version of Opcode MAX is used to drive the board
through a dedicated OS (FTS "faster than sound").
It seems to me that various hardware topics discussed here have 
already been adressed (if not solved) by this thing...

And last (but not least), I tried several times to emulate
some analog-like modules (VCO, VCF...) on that hardware, and I grew 
a strong feeling against analog emulation on DSP : everything just 
sounds too thin and too clean and too static. And I'm going back to 
analog DIY for analog sounds.

Actually I think that each world has its own interesting sides
and drawbacks. And rather that emulation, I think that setting
communication between both worlds (sounds & data going back & forth 
between each world through MIDI, A/D, D/A...) could lead to some
synergy and more thrills.

And by the way, getting rid of patch chords and connecting osc
to filters (like in the above mentionned version of MAX)
just by mouse click is a real pleasure.

And by the way again : why should we stick forever to pot tweaking
and chord patching for interaction & physical feed-back with
music machines ? There are nowadays numerous ways of converting
various parameters (body heat, gestures, brain waves...) to MIDi
to be used to control synth modules through "virtual" patches
built on some (yet-to-be developped) dedicated software.

I think that DSP should be used for other purposes :complex
real-time calculations that analog can't handle, like real-time
2048 points FFT, real-time phase vocoder, etc. 
This could lead to stand-alone modules we could insert in racks 
along with good-old analog stuff...

Yeah !   jbv