[sdiy] interesting patents- Yamaha, Kawai, Ralph Deutsch

[Scott Nordlund]

Somewhat relating to recent discussion of interesting digital synthesis technology (DX7, Synergy, Synclavier, some weird Sony thing), I've found a bunch of oddball patents for ideas that apparently never made it off the drawing board.  Unlike better known technology (Chowning, etc.), it seems to be mostly forgotten.  Google Patents links to cited patents, so there are hundreds to look through.

Yamaha and Kawai were apparently both heavily into digital synthesis research in the 70's.  There are all sorts of patents for digital filtering, additive synthesis, digital envelope generators, etc. years before any commercial implementation.  A lot of them relate to very specific hardware or stuff that's  mundane now, but there's still a lot of good reading material.

Ralph Deutsch comes up a lot.  He was involved with the early Allen Organ digital stuff circa 1971, and kept designing at least through the mid 80's, with some of the technology eventually making its way into the Kawai K5 and probably numerous organs.

A few examples of strange stuff (all Yamaha):
4282790 windowed chirp synthesis, 1979
4135422 strange sine-based synthesis, 1979
4249447 waveshaper feedback synthesis, 1981
3994195 sin-cos product (??) synthesis, 1976
4655115 amplitude modulation feedback synthesis, 1987
4223582 phase distortion (?), 1980

Maybe some of these could find their way into FPGAs...
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail has tools for the New Busy. Search, chat and e-mail from your inbox.
http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_1