Unsorted Notes & Ideas for VSynth Design

More info on ideas for VSynth related development follows below, appears in the MadPsy Lab area, & will shortly have it's own dedicated section.
1. function generator blox - provides waveforms and can be optionally mixed with music to drive other circuitry
and laser scanners.
2. -pulse width modulation, programmable frequency generator....PIC has 16 i/o lines-built in vid wall
switcher/sequencer strip sync before signal passes through switcher, then recombine @ output (gennum & others)
-oscillator - clipper (chop tops from waveforms.
3. Light organ - pulses relay to beat, diff frequency bands - vectorscope/waveform monitor/oscilloscope - display options?
4. EMI/RFI filter/inducer - GSR controller input /SQUID control? / EEG ($2/$300 units)
4a. Change phase / interlace / scanrate / horizontal frequency / vertical frequency / blanking / sync /
color encoder. -Harmonic distortion/ con/de/structive -filters - notch filters - opto-coupled stuff.
5. Nintendo boxing control /power glove.
6. User control/Interface: SONAR? (Apr '97 Nuts & Volts), Carl Motsinger. MIDI Input: circuit converts to control voltages to interact with video circuitry? (Dec'97 -Nuts & Volts, p.52-Thomas Henry)
7. Voice Stress Analysis Input (Xandi $50) (602) 829 0755 / (800) 336 7389.
8. Temp activated Liquid Crystal Plates (Edmund Sci)...I dunno, but looks cool, has possibilities...
9. Transducers: load/pressure sensors & otheres...(dancing people)
10. laser beams being broken-simple switch...triggers video samples, etc..
11. I had some surplus video hardware that I'd hacked together over the years. But was all rare, etc
and I prefer to design / collaborate on public domain circuitry, so that all interested parties can all
duplicate the results
12. all this will be organized soon...bear with me.

INTERFACE Design Misc:
the following taken from a note from DJDesign:
-Midi is good to use as a control for analog machines. For some things though midi is too slow. It can't carry enough information fast enough to keep up with analog video. I was thinking about a combination of controls. Of course lots of knobs and switches to let a person control whatever they can touch. Then midi input for some things, so that simple controls can be scripted with a midi sequencer or controlled live through other midi devices. But I think there also needs to be some kind of third interface for computer, like a network interface, that can send huge amounts of control data quickly to, in a sense, turn all of the knobs at once. I don't know what that should be yet. Something like 10 base T seems natural since it is on Macs and very cheap to add to PCs, but I think it may be too expensive to build into every analog box. Maybe something like USB? I need to research different types of networks more

What my father's Bode audio synthesizer had demonstrated was modularity; the Moog audio synthesizer had demonstrated modularity, voltage control, manufacturing, and distribution. Modularity meant being able to break things into smaller pieces and parts so that you could reconnect the equipment, and one piece of equipment could be connected to and control many pieces of equipment. Voltage control was an analog, MIDI-like system, for controlling functions with other signals. I remember Dan Sandin talking about it as a model for his own IP [video image processor]. What would it take to build a Moog-like synthesizer for video? Well it basically meant running faster amplifiers so you could pass that higher band-width signal. You could mix together camera images; you could filter camera images...These are electronic process-oriented ideas that have to do with high speed switching, that have to do with comparater structures that let you set a voltage level within the video signal. In combining the comparater and the switcher you get a keyer, and you have ways that images be defined, in terms of gray scales, and in what level they would overlay. Luminance keying is a matting technique that you could compare to what had been developed in other mediums, like the solarization processes which historically had been done with film. So on one level they were understood visually, but these same visual effects hadn't been seen before with television and video. But the other part was seeing things that had not been seen before in the coding of other mediums, and that introduced the project of the coding of this new electronic medium

There was a great exhibition at Ars Electronica '92 curated by Woody and Steina Vasulka that had a lot of the early machines made by "Pioneers of Electronic Art". The catalog is great if you can find a copy of it (maybe at an art library). The show included analog video synthesizers from the 60's and 70's, and included my first digital image processor (ca. 1975).

-Oscillators (and other function generator blocks) as inputs for the vmix/keyers

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