Why DIY? (was Re: [sdiy] Another new hard to find part....)

[jbv]

Scott Gravenhorst a *crit :

> Just curious, JB, do you have a website where we can experience what you've done
> with SDIY?

Well I'm afraid the answer is "no"...
even if my current job is to design & code websites, I never found
the time to put anything online, although I've thought of it several
times, thinking it could be a good starting point for more productive
discussions / collaborations with other DIYers...
The other problem is that most of what I have is still in bits & pieces :
having little time to work on it, I often only can test ideas to see if
they'd work... the time needed to put everything in a presentable form
for online publishing is better spent on testing new ideas...
BTW the funny side of the story is that I often test new ideas for analog
modules on a DSP system !!!  that was the case 1.5 years when I was
experimenting with granular synthesis & processing (granular VCO,
filters, phasers, delays...).

Most of the ideas I listed in my previous post are still only that : ideas.
Although last summer I spent some time on the realtime 3D GUI, and
things were quite promising... I didn't work on it for control of a
modular (yet), but as a front end for Csound (actually it uses data
from Csound). And well, I got interesting things, like "granular ghost
partials"... The most important thing is that I realized that that kind of
project is quite feasable on a diy basis (with lots of free time, of course).

IMPORTANT : I noticed a typo in my previous post... suggestion #2
should read as follows :
2- several distant modulars (with their own IP) connected over the net...

Here's another idea I forgot to mention in that previous post (it's not
complex, but a bit tricky to explain). It has to do with data stream
inside a modular.
So far, the kind of signals that can be found in a modular (and patched
between modules) are :
- audio signals
- control voltages (in an ideal situation, any module should accept audio
or control signals as inputs)
- MIDI (eventually).
When working with Csound, I started to wonder if some modules could
output continuous streams of data, like data about freq & amps of partials
for additive or granular synthesis... This could be done by a module doing
the FFT of an audio source. These data could be used by another module
specialized in iFFT resynthesis, but could also be used / processed in a
large number of ways, like modules implementing NN or GA... Of course,
all these uC or DSp based modules would feature analog inputs for control
& variations of their inner algorithm parameters (never dreamed of a NN
controlled by a set of LFOs, or voltages from the analyzer section of a
30 bands vocoder ?)...
Such data streams would certainly need their own connectors & cords, as
they'd need a higher bandwitdth than Midi... and therefore that idea would
certainly face basic hardware problems, such as interferences between signals,
shielding, bandwidth, type of connectors & cords, data format...
Honnestly, I don't know if this leads to anything productive, but at least I
have the feeling it deserves to spend some time brainstorming on it...

Finally, as a (temporary) conclusion to this thread, I would propose the
following sentence : "don't ignore the past, but don't get stuck to it"...

Mmmh... is that list drifting to some buddhist kind of thing or what ? ;-)

JB