Alt control
2000-03-24 by Paul Schreiber
<<resistors all done! finishing up ICs!>> Hey, I'm all for alternate controllers. You can do wonders with just foot pedals. About 20 years ago (gulp!) I made an "Invisible Keyboard" for the University of Texas. It consisted of 12 IR emitter/detector pairs in a 1" x 1" U-channel about 8 inches long. The IR beams went across the channel about 3/4" from each other. They were scanned from "top" to "bottom" with a TTL state machine controlling a 10-bit DAC. When you broke a beam (normally by wiggling your finger in the trough) it latched a 1V/Oct CV and a GATE (er... S-Trig for my Moog IIIc, serial number 6!) . It was kind of dorky but weird to run your finger "in the air" and play little chromatic runs. I put ruler marks by each beam so you could "stab" the notes. Nowadays, you got laser pairs that shoot 10m! I think JM Jarre has a "Light Harp" doo-dad thingie, and Roland has the D-Beam. Yeah, but I did it in 1979 so there! Bizarre controllers were all the rage in say 1975-1981. Even Suzuki made this weird-o electronic autoharp thing. Paul S.