[sdiy] Ralph Deutch and the darker side of the Moon! Casio chips! Re: Much Ado About Almost Nothing

[karl dalen]

Great reading! Thanks Scott!

The part about Ralph Deutsch involvements, patent agent
etc, would fit Harrys request like a glove! :)

His son Leslie seams to be a real thinker to!

What a expericence to get a core patent debunked
and 46 others who built upon that single one!

After some research i found among many things this:
http://music.columbia.edu/pipermail/music-dsp/2000-October/039363.html
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Regarding digital musical instrument patents, around 1981 when I began
modifying the Casio M10, I met a chap who was the agent here for Allen
digital organs.  These were serious "pipe organ" like things for
churches, full of Rockwell LSI chips with round metal chip covers, black
plastic packages with quad inline staggered leads.

He assured me that Allen had licensed a patent, by one Ralph Deutsch (if
I remember correctly, and I haven't thought of it for 18 years or so)
which was for a musical instrument which worked by storing a digital
representation of a waveform in its memory.  He showed me the patents -
I may still have copies somewhere.

He was intrigued by the Casios - the first production digital
keyboards.  He was convinced they used a curious form of synthesis, the
name of Walsh Functions - some mathematical abstraction of little
obvious importance - because he was sure that Casio would not want to be
caught out on Allen's worldwide patents.

The Casio M10 chip and its siblings in the MT-30, MT31, CT-201 (the very
first Casio - 4 octaves, full size, two chips with different waveforms)
work by generating complex 16 step waves (I assume this from what I know
about a later chip I describe below), eight notes at a time.  The waves
are made of two component waveforms and there is crude envelope control
over each.  The sum of the 8 waves appears as a 14 bit binary number at
a sampling rate of about 500 kHz.  This means nice, crisp, non-aliased
high tones!  The DAC was inverters driving a R-2R resistor array for 12
bits and a few resistors for the least significant 2 bits.  There was no
sample and hold - just an op-amp - so timing anomalies in the bits from
the chip and the inverter slew rates caused spikes when the wave went
from 10000x to 01111x.

The waveforms were pretty crude and of course made of stair-steps.  The
signal went through a switchable analogue LPF - but my mods bypass
that.  I even made a super-low glitch tweaked dual 14 bit DAC mod board
for the CT-202, using the standard Casio R-2R network and some extra
resistors, trimpots and judiciously clocked HC174 latches so the rising
and falling edges were symmetrical.

Later, in 1982, Casio produced a similar sounding MT-65 and its
full-size equivalent.  The sound chip in this is a 42 pin custom LSI
which has its note playing and waveforms loaded into it by an external
CPU and software.  Around then, I figured out the protocol for talking
to the chip and wrote a C program (BDS-C for Z80 CPM) to write waveform
data to the chip via the parallel port of a Big Board I.

The reason I mention the Casio is that the chip (the NEC D931) did not
actually receive, or apparently store, waveforms.  It received and
stored *increments* - and used these steps to generate the waveform.  If
your increments did not add up to 0 then all sorts of trouble occurred!

Let me look into my archives . .  In less than a minute I found the
patent!

  US Patent Office 2 June 1970  Patent 3,515,792

  Ralph Deutsch, Sherman Oaks Calif. assignor to North American 
  Rockwell Corporation.

     A digital electronic organ wherein a digital representation of
     an organ pipe wave shape is stored in a memory.  A frequency
     synthesiser activated by a manual or pedal key produces a 
     clock frequency at Nf, where f is the frequency of the note
     selected, and N is the number of sample points of the stored
     wave shape.  The digitized wave shape is read out repetitiously
     at the generated clock frequency and converted to analog form
     to produce a musical note having a waveshape corresponding to
     that stored in memory.  Circuitry is provided to sum digitally
     notes which are played simultaneously; to shape each note in 
     attack and decay using digital operations; and to read out 
     stored multiple wave shapes to implement harmonic and 
     mutation stops.  

There is no mention in the prior art of computer software generation of
music - though I guess no-one had used a computer to make an *organ*.
   

Using increments (albeit simple +/- 1, +/- 2 +/- 4 +/- 8) was probably
harder than simply storing the waveform, and led to less flexibility
than a stored waveform - but I figure that Casio did it so they didn't
have to worry about the Allen patent.  So the dull force of patent law
made a popular instrument more awkward, or at least more idiosyncratic.

I just found my doco file for the chip in the MT-65 - the D931.  All the
guff is there on how to talk to it.  I have C-code as well - and 8 D931
chips, seven unused.  I was able to load novel waveforms into the D931
in my MT-65 it and then play it from the MT-65's CPU via its keyboard,
or the MIDI interface I added.  I also made up a second D931 on an
external board with an independent clock source so I could have two
waveforms and detuning.

A web search for:

   "Ralph Deutsch" and patent

leads to:

   http://www.allenorgan.com/book/jbook.htm

where there are two blank pages, entitled:

  Honoring the Intellectual Property of Others
  Ralph Deutsch and the Dark Side

amongst a lot of other similarly empty pages referring to patent
litigation.  The author is Allen Organ founder Jerome Markowitz, who
died in 1991.  He had been dabbling in electronic organ patents since
the 1930s.  I have some patents of his here, from 1973, on internal
plumbing inside digital organs.



- Robin

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--- Den fre 2010-12-17 skrev Scott Nordlund <gsn10 at hotmail.com>:

> Från: Scott Nordlund <gsn10 at hotmail.com>
> Ämne: Re: [sdiy] Much Ado About Almost Nothing: Man's Encounter with the Electron
> Till: 
> Kopia: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
> Datum: fredag 17 december 2010 08:20
> 
> For anyone who wants the article, I've uploaded it here:
> 
> http://www.mediafire.com/?ldn8rs9bpgn0h6e
> 
> Obviously you'll want to save it because this isn't a
> hosting service.
> 
> Or you can get the whole thesis here:
> 
> http://ir.lib.sfu.ca/bitstream/1892/8931/1/b37359617.pdf
> 
> It's a bit of a read and much of it just digests other
> sources, but it 
> has some interviews with Roland engineers and some stuff
> from firm 
> histories that really available in English.
> 
> > I highly recommend this article:
> >
> > http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1541-0064.2006.00143.x/abstract
> >
> > It's an excerpt from a PhD thesis in geography
> (improbably enough),
> > but it focuses on the rise of the Japanese synth
> industry.
> >
> > The rest of the thesis has info on Yamaha, Roland,
> Korg, Kawai and Casio,
> > but I think this is the most interesting part, with
> the most firsthand
> > accounts and previously unknown information.  It
> interviews Dave Smith
> > and Ralph Deutsch; in particular I was interested in
> the Ralph Deutsch
> > stuff since he's a relative unknown, but also one of
> the most important
> > figures in the electronic music field.  He was
> responsible for the Allen
> > Digital Computer Organ and eventually Kawai K5, did a
> great deal of
> > digital synthesis research for both Yamaha and Kawai,
> and held something
> > like 140 patents.  Interestingly, he's also the
> cousin of Herb Deutsch.
> >
> > I got the whole article through some free registration
> thing; it's
> > kind of a pain.  But I have it saved as an html
> file and can pass it
> > along if anyone wants.
>     
>         
>           
>   
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