steampunk

Have you ever seen a synth as beautiful as this amazing steampunk modular synthesizer?

The level of detail and craftsmanship is just amazing! Read more…

Image: Ricardipus

The Harmonic Synthesizer is an the lobby of the McLennan physics building, University of Toronto.

Here’s the description from the accompanying card:

This marvelous machine was used to dress the output of the large fork and resonator with a controlled set of overtones. Each fork is mounted in front of the appropriate resonator and driven by coils connected in series using the electronome interrupter tuned to the fundamental. A small keyboard opens the resonators.

It appears that the componenets of this apparatus have been redeployed, as the present set-up does not agree with the illustration in the 1889 catalogue and several pieces have been mounted with screws through the maker’s ark – an unlikely occurrence in the original mounting. This was probably done to allow operation of the keyboard from the back.

No word on how this would sound. If you know anything more about this Harmonic Synthesizer, leave a comment!

The Quintrigger, by Mr.Ugly, is an interesting suitcase style, steampunk-esque noise machine:

It’s a quintoscillator feeding into a Hex-Schmitt Trigger that I fed back into itself. The first of many projects where I design something from scratch then circuit bend the shit out of it. The quintoscillator triggers the Schmitt Trigger, then the Schmitt Trigger feeds back into itself via all of those lovely switches! Each switch has 3 positions of modulation, so the number of drone combinations is amazing! And there’s 4 separate outputs. I think that if each output was run through effects into a mixer, you could create some pretty intense walls of symphatic drone. And it all runs off a 9V adapter.

Have fun getting this through TSA inspections!

via doctorultra

Gijs Gieskes created this steampunk Image Scan Sequencer – a mechanical scanner that outputs MIDI:

It uses LDRs to measure the gray-scale of specific point of a image, and triggers midi notes from a selected threshold. When the threshold is reached the velocity will be set by the darkness at that point. the darker point the higher the velocity will be.

The sequencer plays the notes as a arpeggiator, i chose for this playback method because i dont have a midi device that can play 24 keys at the same time.. There are 2 different arpeggio modes. One rearranges the playback sequence to the active notes velocitys. And the second mode changes the arpeggio playback speed to the amount of notes that are active. If this mode is not selected the playback speed is set by a potentiometer. These modes can also be combined.

The image plays a modified version of Treatise by Cornelius Cardew. Details, more demo videos and code at Gieskes‘ site.

OT: This is a video demo of the Mikiphone Pocket Phonograph, a sort of steampunk precursor to the Walkman and iPod.

via bb