Alles Mesh Synthesizer | Hacker News Reader

Alles Mesh Synthesizer

notes.variogram.com

94 pointsschemescape15 comments

Surprising how long it has taken for someone to make this a product, the general idea goes back to at least the early 60s with LaMonte Young and realized in 69 with his Dream House[0] and became common with the rise of the rpi, anyone who has spent much time in the audio DSL community has seen countless posts along the lines of "I just bought 10 rpi and I want to make a bunch of synced standalone synths for an installation but have no idea how." It will be interesting to see what comes of Alles/AMY and what people do with it.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_House_(installation)

Thanks for that reference, it reminded me of Rainforest[0], which IIRC I found out about on the “Ohm: Early gurus of electronic music” album (one of the few physical CDs I have kept along with its packaging, it actually belongs to my daughter now).

0. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5077

It was a good day when OHM was released, probably still have my copy, I do still have the 128k mp3 rip of it I did 20 some years ago. Rainforest can be watched on the amazing ubuweb. Not much for dance myself but watching this was interesting, took effort at first and I am not sure what I think about it but it certainly had an effect.

https://ubuweb.com/dance/cunningham_rainforest.html

In case it's driving you crazy because you can't place it, that 8-second clip is a version of Sleep Walk by Santo & Johnny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rwfqsjimRM

I very cleverly looked at the downloaded filename to figure it out.

It sounds like this is really two things, a software synthesizer toolkit, and a way to sync multiple instances of this software running on multiple devices for a sound installation.

The synth toolkit seems clearly separated as a separate project 'AMY'.

But it does seem to be two things - the syncronization and network software/firmware, and the ESP-based hardware.

My only skepticism comes from the claim that the FM synthesis is accurate, FM is very hard to emulate well in my experience. Modern different FM hardware platforms which tout DX compatibility sound different from the classic ASICs and even the classic chips sound different from each other. I suppose I will have to get the code and run it, I'm not saying it's not good. But it's not an easy problem to solve.

it seems like discrete convolution is a pretty solved problem. sure, capturing the character of some old analog implementation is going to be just a guessing game, but are you referring to something more fundamental?

The DACs and output stage are at least as important as minor ASIC differences, some equipment had better gear and it's a fact.

Please do try and report back. I understand your skepticism.

Very cool! I have no idea how these projects compare to each other on a technical level, but I'm reminded of the wooden doll choir by teenage engineering:

https://teenage.engineering/products/choir

Or you could use a software defined radio and as many boomboxes as you want.

Technically true but falls afoul of a number of FCC regulations in the US. Now if you had 900MHz boom boxes, that could be a thing. In general though I think the WiFi design is a better solution.

Maybe bluetooth speakers? Not sure if it syncs tume well enough. Guess you could have a calibration mic at the transmitter...

That has some merit, a friend did a 'choir in a parking lot' project (COVID thing) where people started with a calibration phase to capture the timing relationships. Once basic calibration was done a low frequency tone in the signal was used to keep everything aligned. (that was the part I advised on, a 32 channel PLL :-))

The synthesizer project had me looking back at some of the firefly experiments (units syncing up by blinking an LED that other units can see). To some extent though "real" orchestras have phasing/timing issues between sections which gives them some of their timbre and removing it makes the music sound "computer generated". A loooong time ago another person I know was trying to inject this sort of variation into MIDI streams in order to make game music more "realistic." I don't know if that made it into production though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com