CATSYNTH

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Category: Synthesizers

  • CatSynth pic: cat with modular

    Submitted by our friend brrer:

    Anyone care to identify the modular synth?





  • Theremin Cats

    From Brian Sacawa: Sounds Like Now:

    The context for this picture is Sacawa's lament that early theremin virtuosi concentrated on trying to get the instrument to play traditional western tonal music, rather than exploring the radically new ways of organizing pitch and structure afforded by the instrument. This is indeed something that concerns me about many of the efforts going on to “de-experimentalize” computer music and simply turn it into another tool for traditional classical or popular forms. The great promise of electronic instruments is to allow people to break with the traditions of acoustic music. But Sacawa concludes:

    Maybe if more cats–unlike humans, who are so grounded in western tonal music–played the theremin we might witness the instrument's full potential.

    And thus we have theremin-playing cats.

    Check out this feline thereminist from YouTube:




  • Wordless Wednesday: Studio keyboards

  • CatSynth pic: Didier (black cat), Roland and Accordion

    Submitted by pete nelson of No Percussion No Explosion:

    Pic is of didier ignoring juno 60 in favour of childrens accordion

    Didier reminds me a bit of Luna. What do you think?






  • New Podcast: Remix of Ninjam sessions June 15/17, UCSC DANM exhibition.

    Well, it's another Sunday, and another podcast for the CatSynth Channel.

    Click here to subscribe.

    Tonight's podcast features some live internet improvisation using NINJAM, a system that allows people to share live audio in real time and thus jam together over the internet. To overcome network latency that has stymied most systems for online collaboration, NINJAM actually adds delay so that everyone's audio conforms to a particular meter and tempo, i.e., everyone's down beats are in sync though they may be a measure or two off from one another. This leads to either simple “groove” jams on one or two chords and a steady beat (think of the 70s jazz classic Chameleon), or freeform improvisation.

    The particular sessions used in this remix were from June 15 and 17 featuring several performers live at the Digital Media Factory in Santa Cruz California as part of the MFA Exhibition for the Digital Art and New Media (DANM) program at UC Santa Cruz. Though I am not a student, one of my best friends is, and so I had the opportunity to perform in several of the jams with local musicians as well as others over the internet.

    Out of several hours of material, I made a 30-minute “remix” of several of the jams. The feel ranges from free-form to driving funk/jazz rhythms to a relaxed fusion/lounge feel (this happened when most of the musicians turned out to be keyboard players) and more.

    All recorded mixes from the NINJAM AutoSong Archive, which are the sources for this track, are released under the Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike Creative Commons License v2.5..

    Collaborators on the various jams include synthany, mvollrath, dbkick, tbfx, Funkify, leftyf, Oubien_ke, ekinox, hotdog, and chazz. (Sorry if I missed anyone).

    Synthany is Synthia Payne and friends at the DANM exhibition, where I played as well. For my parts, I used E-MU Emulator X2 on my PC laptop, doing keyboard/piano, rhythms (using TwistaLoop), and even some bass when it was needed.

    As always, comments are welcome. I'm not sure my brief discription really did justice to the topic or this particular example of online music collaboration, so feel free to ask more about it, or research the topic for yourself. In the meantime, enjoy.

  • CatSynth pic: lissajous (chaos link)

    Via matrixsynth:

    Originally from gerald:

    My cat loves the Lissajous this thing generates

    So what is a “Lissajous”? it is actually short for Lissajous curves or Lissajous figures, a class of 2D (and 3D) curves describing complex harmonic functions, or more simply multi-dimensional sine curves. The following equations describe a general Lissajous curve on an x-y coordinate plane:

    x = A sin(at + φ)
    y = B sin(bt)

    Most of the time, one leaves out the A and B, which case all the curves fall on a convenient unit square.

    The most commonly described Lissajous curves set the phase term φ to π/2, i.e., a standard cosine function, and have a and b at integer ratios, like 1:2, 6:5, etc. You can think of these as natural harmonics, like in musical sounds. You can see a few of the graphs below, first for a=1 and b=2:

    Here are 3:2 (a:b), and 9:8, respectively:

    As you can see, the higher the ratio, the more complex and dense the figure. If you add all the figures up together, you should be able to fill the entire unit square.

    There are all sorts of interesting special cases. For example, if you set a and b equal, you will get a circle. If you additionally set the φ to zero, you will get a straight line. Finally, you can mess with different values of φ, like 0.3 in the first drawing below, or set a and b to non-integer values, to get all sorts of interesting variations:

    It is interesting to think about these sorts of functions by relating them both visually and aurally (i.e., synthesizing the corresponding waveforms), but we will leave that as an exercise for interested readers, perhaps returning to the topic in a future article.






    Trying a little experiment. Trackposted to Gone Hollywood, Conservative Cat, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, and The Pet Haven Blog, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe. The links here and in the trackbacks do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this site or its contributors.

  • The CatSynth Eighty-three

    It seems like everyone these days has a “top 100 list”, indeed we are listed on a few of them. Well, we at CatSynth like to be different, so we're introducing the “CatSynth 83.” All sites related to cats, synthesizers, electronic music, or any of the other topics frequently discussed on this site like highways, mathematics, software, etc., can apply. We will list to top 83 participating sites. So come and join the only top-sites list based on a neglected prime number.

  • CatSynth Pic: Hey Diddle Diddle Goes Techno

    From Stephan71 at flickr:

    One day I caught Mingus stomping on various keys of the keyboard I had left on the floor. Funny thing, Mingus was named after Charles Mingus, the jazz bass player. I didn't bother to look what patch he had punched in on the synthesizer, whether it was set to “bass” or “fiddle”. He does also have a Beethovenesque look on this pose, doesn't he? Who knows…

    Doesn't Mingus look a bit like Luna?

  • Octave Cat SRM Demontration Videos

    Via matrixsynth, some demo videos of the most site-appropriate synthesizer, the Octave CAT:

    Happy New Year?

    Videos originally from OriginalJambo on YouTube.

  • CatSynth pics: more Daphne

    Remember Daphne, who “loves bleepy sounds”? Well, she's back with some more photos from sushiluv.

    First, via matrixsynth, here she is w/ a Moog:

    And doing some “Fat Cat Beats” with an Akai box: