<-- The Fatman that stopped living and became a mixed up TB303-wannabe. I don't have a photo of this thing yet, but that's the faceplate of the sequencer part. Details to come...
Colbeck Labs Multi-Million Dollar Recording Facility: pitchers to come. Hint: All PAIA, all the time.
Other People's stuff i.e. stuff other people designed, but its on my workbench now...Craig Anderton Stage Center Reverb, Lorin's Insanium, Marc Barelle's Polivoks VCF, PAIA magical vocal/instrument zapper...
my CEM VCO collection bringing back the Aries Modular form-factor, too yet.
DOS email/RSS client so i don't have to look at the internet anymore.
New Fez I need to make a new fez. You should, too.
Bert 2.0 First there was the travesty program Racter, which could analyze samples of text and write something in the same style. Then Henry Lowengard wrote Bite for the Amiga, which did the same thing with audio samples. Several years ago I wrote bert, which implemented the idea as i understood it for the pc. i was proud of Bert--it listened to an audio sample, seperated it into words, organized the words by audio frequency, figured out a "grammer" based on that frequency, and then spit out new "sentences" based on this grammar. Trouble was, it didn't run on anything later than Win98, and the pc's soundcard had to be set *just so* or it wouldn't do anything. I'm hoping to eventually create a new, more user friendly version someday.
Atmospheric Disturbance Generator...another project i've looked at on-and-off for years but never make any headway on. So, i really like that VLF Radio stuff, but you can't listen to it anywhere near AC power because of the hum. wouldn't it be great if we could design a collection of circuits to simulate VLF signals, even use them as musical compositional elements? sure it would...everyone would want one. I just can't get it built, tho.
Speech! Speech! Man, i was really into old-school speech synthesis for awhile there...somewhere around the lab I still have 2 SPO256s, a Votrax SC01, and that Texas Instrument chip whose name escapes me at present. Jim Hewitt designed a really nice circuit around the SPO256, and I built one of those--it used a Basic Stamp 2 for the "brains". He no longer sells the pcb, but all the schematics, code, and other documentation are still right here. The SPO256 chip is late 70's vintage, and makes a terrific robot voice, but it was sort of a pain in the butt to convert the phoneme data to ASCII for use with the Stamp 2. At one point I wrote a php script which would allow the user to enter as much English text as they wanted, and then convert it to ASCII data by piping each word to dictionary.com, extracting the phonetic spelling, and replace the phonetic characters to ASCII codes. Despite the fact that dictionary.com tends to just return the present tense, singular version of words, it worked pretty well. Damned if i know what I did with that script, tho. If i rebuild that SPO256 circuit, i should really rewrite that thing. I never built anything with the SC-01, but i should someday--its slightly more natural sounding speech than the SPO256. In fact, it was the voice of Q-Bert, if that helps you place it. I never found out how that Texas Instrument chip sounded, but it was part of a speech synthesizer that plugged into the side of the TI-99 computer. It might be fun to make a super speech module, incorporating all three of them--I could program it to "sing" xmas carols, sort of a robot version of that weird old SNL sketch where Tarzan, Tonto, and Frankenstein's monster would sing together for some reason. And now there is the speechjet chip, which produces fairly natural sounding speech and other interesting sound effects. Lastly, there is documentation floating around for a device called the chatterbox, sort of a "manual" speech synth--an analog joystick controls two band-pass filters, which simulates a stripped down model of the human vocal tract. Primitive, sure, but I've never heard anything quite like that.