[sdiy] Floppy Disks for Analog Synths (was: Nifty Slider/Fader alert)

[Sven Windisch]

On Sun, 6 Jun 2004, nN AAt     e     e wrote:

Hi Nate et al.

>
> > Now that floppy disk drives and analog synths have been mentioned in
> > the same sentence, has anyone ever given any thought to using a
> > modified floppy disk for any sort of analog recording, perhaps getting
> > several minutes of recording time out of an eight-inch floppy, for
> > example?
>
> at first i though... 'sampling analog to floppy disks? has he not been
> following the thread at all? is he on crack?'...
> and then i realized... 'WAIT! does he mean using the floppy disk as a
> circular tape? a magnetic record! yes! he is on crack!"

When I read this first, i thought about some "Disk-Lag", writing the
Sounds
to the Disk on one Side, after half a turn read it and a quarter turn
later delete it for new writing.

> while its a novel idea... i can only imagine how big a pain in the ass the
> interface to it would be... but if you could get it working... you might
> have some fun little things to do with it... freaky "lock-grooves" for
> loops, like a weird sort of mellotron if you changed the speed to adjust for
> pitch... [VCFD... Voltage Controlled Floppy Drive?]

Well, no pain for the interface. Just eliminate the interface and drive
the motor directly by simply a CV. *Then* it would be real VCFD. Don't
know if this is practicable. Otoh, one could do some interfacing do the
Drive, but that would imply programming some chip, so thats not *that*
analog...

> that the re-release of the Mellotron was very quiet], but i like the idea of
> the the computer printers turned into pseudo mellotrons with bits of tape on
> the spool...

Some months ago, there was a link here to some weird things they did with
old IBM-Dotmatrix-Printers. Sending different Chars to the printer
resulted in different tones. This way they made music. (And btw, the
worst version of the Blue-Danube-Waltz I ever heard.)

Greets,
Sven.


-- 
To some ears, "computational philosophy of science" will
sound like the most self-contradictory enterprise in
philosophy since business ethics.
[Paul Thagard in "Computational Philosophy of Science"]