[sdiy] Timbreon and firmware synth

[Batz Goodfortune]

Y-ellow Ken, Cynthia, Theo 'n' all.
         Maybe it wasn't the Horizon show. I seem to vaguely recall that 
one too but it's been a long time and I'm not entirely sure. I could have 
sworn I was still in high school at the time and we still had black and 
white TV. But I have no idea really. I just remember the Timbreon and not a 
whole lot of detail about it either.

As to it's control method and Cynthia's suggestion. I've tried several 
ideas like that over the years. None of them successfully lending 
themselves to doing this kind of thing exactly. The problem as I see it, is 
taking parameters in 2.5 dimensions. That is, left/right-front/back + 
velocity/pressure. An over-sized touch surface might lend it's technology 
to the solution but then the problem becomes that the surface is 
ergonomically curved. Like the top of a loaf of bread. Moving your hand 
front to back is more of a rotational movement than a slide.

I've also tried the trick that's spoze to work with video tape. Buggered if 
I can get that to work. A piece of 1/2 inch video tape is spoze to be 
slightly conductive and increases fairly lineally with length. I couldn't 
get anything useful out of that. Not with the range of samples I tried 
anyway. Likewise with conductive mylar. The type of stuff used in IC 
anti-static packaging. My guess is that whatever is conductive in these 
materials is like a layer witin a laminate. So that from the surface it's 
an insulator but has a sheilding property. Or in the case of video tape, is 
covered by a binding layer perhaps.

The thing is that in it's day, the Timbreon would have been the perfect 
synth controller. Since it was, by all accounts, a continuously variable 
device end to end. Lending it self to a wide-range voltage control. I 
always thought it an elegant solution to remove the keyboard dependence. 
However in the age of MIDI and digital control in general, there would be 
some rather interesting problems to overcome. Well at least there would be 
if one wanted to re-create the continuously variable nature of the Timbreon.

I'd thought that maybe you would have to take control of portamento time 
and augment that with pitch bending. All in some kind of preemptive 
fashion. But first it would have to be able to extract data in 2-1/2D. And 
how it would figure out if you were playing it with one or two hands. As I 
seem to recall the demo showing.

I was wondering if you could do it using some kind of hall-effect type 
arrangement. Supposing the surface was made of some sort of magnetic, 
metalized rubber material. Perhaps the same stuff as fridge magnets only 
thinner. Supported on some kind of spongy substrate layer. And then some 
kind of sensor matrix a-kin to a graphics tablet. All this sounds more like 
a nightmare of problems though. And then sensing velocity/pressure would be 
another difficulty.

I guess I need to do some more materials research to see if it's even 
feasible. But it would be nice to cite how the original was done first. The 
other problem with the conductive foam, BTW, which was my first thought, 
was the relative thickness. By the time you got several layers, you'd end 
up with an entirely too spongy mass. It's a bit of a contradictions. One 
one hand you'd need something that can deform to pressure/velocity. On the 
other you need it almost drum-tight so your hand can slide easily across it 
one brought down. You don't want to be fighting against pressure ripples in 
the surface. This is why I started looking at things like mylar. Which of 
course has it's own set of problems. I don't know about capacitive sensing 
but I questioned it's reliability to sense an accurate position with 
something like the side of your hand.

Anyway, Thanks for that.

be absolutely Icebox.

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