Casper Electronics has announced that it’s now taking pre-orders for the Drone Lab V2, a 4 voice analog drone synth, rhythm generator and FX processor.

Description:

The Drone Lab is capable of generating rich, textured soundscapes, hypnotic drones and complex rhythmic sequences. It features a series of filter and distortions circuits as well as an audio input jack. This allows it to be used as an effects processor for external audio signals.

The Drone Lab retails for $50 for the PCB only, $200 for a PCB and parts kit, and $350 fully assembled.

via bubagoo:

PCBs and complete parts kits will be available starting October 20th.
This is the new Drone Lab analog drone synthesizer by casperelectronics in collaboration with Electromagics.

Ordering info is available at casperelectronics.com
For more info on Drone Lab features go to:
http://casperelectronics.com/finished…

Electromagics: http://www.electromagics.com/

Questions and comments welcome at pete[at]casperelectronics[dot]com.

The Drone Lab is a 4 voice analog drone synth, rhythm generator and FX processor.
The Lab has an external input with pre amp which accepts audio signals from any audio source including microphone, guitar, keyboard and other Drone Labs. External signals can be mixed with the existing drone and run through the lab’s filter and distortion circuits.
The Lab also features a clock interface which allows the internal rhythm clock to be linked with a variety of external clocks.

Critter and Guitari’s Color Television Oscilloscope is a $99 device that turns your audio input into psychedelic video output:

This video device has an audio input and video output. It behaves like a traditional oscilloscope, with a control to change the display mode and colors. The sweep rate is fixed at the NTSC frame rate, about 30 Hz.

One knob controls the input gain, and the other controls the display. There are 2 modes: line mode, and color shifter mode. The first half of the knob rotation is color shifter mode, and the second half is line mode. Line mode is simply a line with adjustable width and color. Color shifter mode is made up of bars that change color. The rate of change is adjustable.

Video Scope mounted to painted panel with 2 knobs, RCA audio input, video output (NTSC only), 9v power input (adapter included)

Here’s some video of the Color Television Oscilloscope in action:

Click here to view the embedded video.

These look like they could be a great effect, run off different channels of audio.

If you’ve used Critter and Guitari’s Color Television Oscilloscope, leave a comment with your thoughts!

The Strange Agency is turning into one of the most interesting developers of music apps for the iPhone.

We’ve previously featured their app Curtis – a $1 iPhone granular synthesizer. The video above previews a new Strange Agency app, Sound Scope Space.

Description:

Part oscilloscope and part theremin. Part music and part science. Part instrument and part trip toy. Instead of simply displaying a waveform, Sound Scope lets you interactively sculpt sound by shaping sound waves with its unique touch interface!

Play it like an instrument, simply pinching with two fingers. You get full volume control, and the pitch spans an enormous range, from the deepest bass to an ear-piercing screech. Try for vibrato and tremolo effects with a little finger wiggle!

Got an old TV doing nothing because of the digital TV switch?

Instructables has a couple of tutorials on how to turn your old TV into an oscilloscope:

• CRT oscilloscope (more of an audio/visual display)
• How to Make A CRT TV Into an Oscilloscope

All you need to do this MacGuyver-style project is an old TV, some wire, a soldering gun, some rubber-handled pliers and a screwdriver.

Note: “avoid death if possible” recommends one of the tutorials. We second this recommendation.

This video takes a look at UK electronic music pioneer Peter Zinovieff and Electronic Music Studios (EMS).

via JeffreyPlaide:

Peter Zinovieff’s pioneering work into the fields of electronic music production and research led to many innovative electronic music instrument developments that were outstanding for the time. Peter was fascinated by electronic music and used his financial resources to develop a huge voltage-controlled studio that occupied an entire room in his home premises

There was a time when EMS (Electronic Music Studios) stood as equal to Moog and Arp.

In many ways, EMS was more advanced with several pioneering ideas being investigated. Peter used two PDP8 minicomputers in the late 1960s to control the voltage-controlled analogue modules for research into electronic music exploration. Twenty years before affordable computing and sequencing packages, Zinovieff’s computers could store and replay compositions, complete with sound shaping parameters even inventing a form of spectral or additive synthesis.

Excerpts are edited from the television documentaries “What the Future Sounded Like” and “The New Sound of Music” featuring the first public performance of music by a computer in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1967.

The spirit of EMS continues, and Peter’s synthesizer innovations like the VCS3 and Synthi 100 have become outstanding analogue classics.

Videographic Modulations for Meditation and Visualisation – music and visualizations by Jeffrey Siedler, from 1995.

via JeffreyPlaide:

Shortened from its original 21-minute version, this work is a visual and aural meditation.

The abstract images were intended to instill a calm, giving the mind a focus, much as would be accomplished by focusing on a mandala. The ambient music underlying the imagery was composed to create a relaxation of the body and is of a suitably unearthly surreal quality to bring about an aural complement to the animated visuals.

The images and music represent levels that transcend the world of appearances, the world of this reality. The images describe the harmonic patterns of the natural universe.

Created by analogue video synthesis, the imagery results in a complex cascade of dynamic modulating waveforms.

Eric Archer has come up with a new music sequencer based on the Fibonacci sequence.

Here are the details behind it:

Fans of the Golden Ratio know that it is built-in to the Fibonacci Sequence, being the ratio of S(n)/S(n-1) when n is very large.

But lets make it more complicated.

The Lagged Fibonacci Generator is a generalized version that looks at a wider “history window”; instead of the two previous numbers, it lets you go back farther in the list with parameters j and k.

S(n) = S(n-j) + S(n-k)

These numbers are limited to whatever bit depth you choose to represent them. Whenever the addition generates a “carry”, it rolls over at zero again and outputs a carry flag. For example, if you’re using 8 bits, the m value is 2^8, or 256. What happens then is magic because instead of an ever-increasing string of numbers, you get a set of numbers that hop around back and forth between zero and m. The complexity of the sequence grows rapidly with larger j and k values, but its never random or chaotic.

Here’s the details on Archer’s demo video, above:

Here is an excerpt from my unreleased videotape “Thirteen Meditations on the Meaning of the Tao”.

The patterns are synthesized with a Lagged Fibonacci Generator (LFG) circuit built with discrete logic chips (CD4000 CMOS). The LFG is an algorithm sometimes used in cryptography to generate encryption keys.

I’m exploring it as a pattern generator for algorithmic art and music.

Although cryptographers like the LFG because its output is similar to white noise, I find that through creative electronic filtering, the intricate details of its cyclic patterns become visible, and we can appreciate the details.

Digital patterns from the LFG are converted to two analog outputs with separate hardware of my design. These analog waveforms were processed through an Electrix Filter Queen resonant filter, and visualized on a high resolution Tektronix X-Y monitor. The video was recorded to VHS with a camera pointed at the screen. The audio was recorded directly, and contains the same waveforms being displayed.

via EA78751, Make

Rob Hensley’s Audio Scope (App Store link) is a $.99 iPhone app that uses the remote i/o audio unit for handling audio input and output.

The application can display the input audio in one of the forms, a regular time domain waveform, a frequency domain waveform (computed by performing a fast fourier transform on the incoming signal), and a sonogram view (a view displaying the frequency content of a signal over time, with the color signaling relative power, the y axis being frequency and the x as time).

Tap the sono button to switch to a sonogram view, tap anywhere on the screen to return to the oscilloscope. Tap the FFT button to perform and display the input data after an FFT transform. Pinch in the oscilloscope view to expand and contract the scale for the x axis.

iOscilloscope (App Store link) is a new $.99 app that turns your iPhone into a virtual oscilloscope that can measure sound waves in real time.

iOscilloscope lets you do do several different things:

• FFT allows you to view the sound waves in Fast Fourier transform mode.
• Mute, mutes the sound so that there is no feedback.
• Sonogram allows you to view the sound waves in a sonogram form.

Note that iOscilloscope will not function when headphones are plugged into your iPhone.

This is sort of stupidtacular, but at least it can handle the Prodigy.

Here’s how it works:

A hard drive voice coil circuit is hacked to allow it to be directly connected to a stereo output. This allows audio to move the hard drive read write head. Mirrors are positioned on the center of the platter and hinged on the side to allow a way for the laser to be moved in two axis. The read write head is connected to the hinged mirror so that they move together. And finally a laser is mounted to the hard drive pointing at the hinged mirror. Crank up the tunes and have fun!