Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/17/look-mum-no-computer-finishes.html
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The aliens from 2001: A Space Odyssey called and would like to know what is going on.
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Sam Battle’s channel is fantastic, although it’s a constant reminder I have left so many synths unbuilt; so many noisy circuits unsoldered; and so many bleeps unblooped.
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Pffft. My kiddo made one when she was like 2 years old.
EDIT: Museum of Science Boston
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In the end, he used 2400 nobs
That’s quite a crew! Needed extra fingers to hold stuff to be soldered? Did any of them have necks?
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Old school kilodrone: Johann Strauss II conducted a 2,000-piece orchestra and a 20,000 piece choir for the World Peace Jubilee festival in 1872. He had five relay conductors to pass on the beat, and the start was synchronised with a cannon.
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For a real KiloDrone, you’d need 1024.
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Does each of these modules have its own monitor? If they were being used in the normal way, having more of them wouldn’t make the sound bigger in the room. Of course, what comes out of YouTube isn’t real anyway, so it’s up to him if he wants to mix it as though it’s louder than a jet engine where he is.
It’s an interesting mental rabbit hole. If you do something like this for real, but it’s only ever experienced online, and you inevitably alter the reality in the course of posting it, is that any more or less real than “faking” the whole thing using CG images and sound? Assuming no one is tricked, would that be worse, or better?
I mean, we’re talking about synthesizers; the whole point is to go beyond what is practical or even physically possible with sound in the real world.
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That would be a KibiDrone!
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Just think of how much heat that generates!
Now it’s time for someone to wave the nagging finger about the environment, energy, etc.
I’m kind of doing that, but honestly given the state of corporate capitalism anybody changing or paying attention to it on a personal level is a sap.
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My Pandemic Project has a little synth integrated in: http://lightherder.blogspot.com/2020/08/a-creature-comes-alive-audio.html
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There is some merit to actually building something like this rather than doing it all digitally. You can hear the difference between one bee and two, and between two and four. As you add more bees, the drone changes its timbre. At what point does it become ‘many’ bees? Apparently somewhere between 100 and 1000.
Suppose you simulate a thousand bees. They are not all at exactly the same pitch. Do they ‘swarm’ towards a common pitch? This would probably give you more average bees, and less three-sigma outliers. This guy, hand-tuning his oscillators probably got a similar distribution. While I believe a digital simulation would be accurate, it is fun to see it actually done.
He has also done a nice job keeping the oscillators independent. They could have locked together in groups. There is a thing called Van de Pol entrainment, which is a bit like Huygens’ clocks ticking together but with electric fields. But they didn’t.
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Good Old Dick Tingly is a knob.
In other news…
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The next time they make a “Phantom of the Opera” movie, I want the Phantom to play the KiloDrone! Just the sort of obsessive work a Phantom might do…
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This was my first thought:
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Good lord, I can barely replace grip tape on an old skateboard as a personal project without my wife wondering what the hell I am wasting my time on.
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That was quite awesome and quite pointless but quite awesome.
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hey i just signed up to let you know it uses 1.2amps at 12v, and produces not enough heat for me to measure, so this means it most likely uses less power than a computer trying to simulate it.
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