[sdiy] Timbreon and firmware synth

[Ken Stone]

The show was made by "Horizon". It showed around 1979-1980, and I believe
was British.

Ken


>Firstly. A very rare experimental instrument from the early~mid 70s called 
>a Timbreon. At least that's how I think it should be spelt. I have tried 
>other iterations. Should be pronounced "Tamb-er-on" but at the time was 
>pronounced more phonetically as "Timber-on" It appeared in an early 70s 
>documentary called. "The new sound of music" which may or may not have been 
>an Australian produced docco. But has long since vanished along with 
>hundreds of episodes of Dr. Who and almost all trace of the Aunty Jack 
>Show. Erased by the intelligentsia that ruled in despot-like fashion over 
>the ABC here at the time. But back to the instrument.
>
>I don't know what technology was underneath this thing in terms of a 
>controller. It was referred to as an instrument in it's own right at the 
>time but they all said that. It was some kind of analog synth with 
>possibly, one of the coolest alternate controllers. Given that synths were 
>generally monophonic at the time and this was designed for the job. 
>Actually it was, I guess, duo-phonic.
>
>It resembled what I guess you'd describe as a long loaf of bread. About as 
>long as a 76 note keyboard. It's upper surface appeared to be made of some 
>relatively soft or semi-padded material. It probably had some kind of slide 
>ribbon arrangement inside of it but there was more to it than that.
>
>It was played karate-chop style with the sides of the hands. Left to right 
>was pitch as you'd expect. It had a velocity kind of sensing so that the 
>harder you hit it, the louder it was. But depending on where you hit it, 
>front to back, gave you another control element (Probably filter). You 
>could also do things like hit a note and slide in pitch or timbre by 
>repositioning your hand. The demonstrator played it with two hands so some 
>how it must have been able to tell the difference. I have no idea how it 
>could have discerned all that with 1970s analog/slide-ribbon type 
>technology.  For all I know they could have used pneumatic tubes.
>
>As a kid, I vowed to build one of these things and for some reason I 
>remembered how cool it was this morning. I thought someone may have 
>archived some information about it somewhere but it seems not. But maybe 
>I'm just searching for the wrong thing. Maybe everyone's forgotten about 
>the Timbreon and it has been re-invented with some newer technology? I 
>don't know. But if anyone has any thoughts on this I'd be most interested.
>
_______________________________________________________________________
Ken Stone   sasami at hotkey.net.au or sasami at cgs.synth.net
Modular Synth PCBs for sale <http://www.blaze.net.au/~sasami/synth/>
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