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

Sat Dec 18 07:25:25 CET 2010

I think I'd read that Robin Whittle post years ago.  Turns out the Casios don't use Walsh functions that I know of (though the RMI Harmonic Synthesizer actually does; RMI was owned by Allen Organ, so that may be why the guy knew of them), but I doubt Casio's implementation infringes on the Ralph Deutsch patents.  

You can see the inside of the Allen Digital Computer Organ here (with suitably dorky narration): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YomV2dSNGLg

Apparently organs were only the second consumer application of ASICs after calculators (both of these were initiated by Rockwell).

----------------------------------------
> Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2010 05:18:09 +0000
> From: dalenkarl at yahoo.se
> Subject: Ralph Deutch and the darker side of the Moon! Casio chips! Re:[sdiy] Much Ado About Almost Nothing
> To: gsn10 at hotmail.com
> CC: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
>
> 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
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> --- Den fre 2010-12-17 skrev Scott Nordlund :
>
> > Från: Scott Nordlund 
> > 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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> >
>
>