[sdiy] Control Interfaces (was Wakeman)

[Scott Gravenhorst]

This has been a very interesting thread with lots of good ideas and thoughts.  

My own view is to make a comparison between synths and "natural instruments",
i.e., instruments with built in resonant chambers such as a wooden box or a
hollow tube, must have a human player as _part_of_ the instrument itself.  I
played clarinet and guitar in highschool and afterward piano and now synth. 
With the clarinet I was part of the system that makes the sound.  I found
that changing the shape of the inside of my mouth caused a distinct change in
the timbre of the instrument.  Likewise jaw pressure on the reed as well as
exactly where on the reed I would bite.  It seems that each instrument is a
little different this way and the musician as a technician must learn how to
control the "modulation" aspects of each one.  This is very natural, at least
to me, and I think it is because the player is really part of the instrument.

A synthesizer is a completely different animal, without resonant boxes or
cavities or tubes that can be easily and directly controlled by human actions
and body parts such as the mouth (a cavity in and of itself), rather they
have some (crude or otherwise) analogs of these things implemented with
electronics, not wind, a bow, a pick, a tube or a cavity etc.  I think what
we are discussing here is how to make the human a part of the instrument the
way one would interact with something like a sax.  Also, as modulars go, each
one is very different from the rest.  Especially when you consider how
patches change the instrument (something "natural" instruments don't emulate).  

So we've got knobs, sliders, key pressure, foot pedals, breath controllers,
resistive strips, joysticks etc. as a set of control options, but it seems
that none stands out as "supreme" or ubiquitous.  

What I wonder is if there is some other new way of thinking that can be
applied to the question of control.  For example, is there a way to use a
sliding tube arrangement (think trombone or slide whistle) that can interact
with a synth as part of the instrument?  Such as an arrangement where an
impulse (from a speaker?) activates the air column in the tube and some kind
of sensor (a microphone?) that senses the impulse and feeds back into a
circuit that retriggers the impulse to generate a continuous tone much the
same way a reed interacts with a column of air to produce it's tone.

I don't know how much sense this makes to you all, but I just wonder if there
is a way to make the human more a part of the instrument in ways that are
perhaps more natural than a knob.  Maybe the interface requires
non-electronic components to be included in the instrument.

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-- Scott Gravenhorst | LegoManiac / Lego Trains / RIS 1.5
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