Tocante Redd


The Tocante line of musical instruments is "about" and "touching" the materials of electronics. Each touchpad represents a pitch according to industry "preferred numbers," chosen by old wartime engineers for non-musical purposes. Here they form a unique and haunting musical scale, not unlike that of a gamelan or the neutral intervals of Persian music. Beyond these base pitches, three golden sandrodes flank each touchpad; touching these androgynous nodes yields intermodulation, pitch and timbral shifts, and emergent chaotic masses. The instruments come in three flavors: thyris the triangle, bistab the square, and phashi the circle. The oscillators sound like a bowed string, a most powerful clarinet, and a howling serene whistle, respectively. Each responds to touch differently. Solar panels charge the onboard batteries, that power the oscillators and a speaker. They are the perfect self-contained instrument for nightly music at the campground.
 Tocante Redd uses the alternative scale of the E12 series: 12, 18, 27, 39, 56, and 82. Enjoy the relationship of red to green in a spectrum of major, minor and neutral thirds.
  • Enabling new modulations.
  • The relationship of green to red.

otsink.mp3

Tocante Studworth


Both a manual to assemble an analog synthesizer, and a simulation of how to tune it by capacitor, so the relationship of comment to code is that of soldering to music. Presenting this file, studworth.scd, it first creates a library of available capacitor values in varying specificities from e3 to e12. The file then offers the “materials scale” for the synthesizer, which uses capacitor values equally in different interlocking patterns of serial and parallel. It also emulates various capacitor precision spreads, which result in detuning akin to granular synthesis. The magnum opus is to emulate a traditional musical scale, d minor, by picking capacitor recipes from a giant sorted list of all possible combinations. If you want to simulate the scales, please get Supercollider 3. Mouser BOM!
 Now you can build it yourself! Tocante studworth is a "through-hole" version, bigger by the relationship between 1/2 inch and one centimeter! I will send you a bare board so you can make your own case, find the parts on mouser and ebay, and install and solder them with a pretty finish. Good luck!

Ordering

TOCANTE STUDWORTH

Tocante Green

Specifications

Dimensions: 28x8x2 centimeters.
Range: 24 notes, four octaves.
Power: 6x300mah NiMH cells.
Diffusion: 0.5watt speaker.
Output: 3.5mm mono audio jack.
Cloudy Day: 2.1mm tip-positive 12vdc power jack.

Ordering

FAQ

Karper is the newest idea, using 24 separate 8bit microcontrollers to do that many parallel Karpluss-Strong string synthesizers, in the tocante scale. Each string has a trigger and two sources of "the noise of computation" or the least significant, hairiest bits magnified as 1bit music (T.P.) These can be output to the trigger, or two circuit-bending nodes that change the octave and pitch degree, or simply listen to the noise of computation on a braided, inner pre-amp. Bass Bistab is that instrument, but using capacitors a decade lower, or about three octaves and a third, so that it reaches into haptic (beat patterns) range. Bass Thyris is that instrument with the same mode, but the mellower, more baritone range that waveshape affords. Zenert is a simple name, deriving from the source of its noise, a zener diode, and the spectral flavoring applied by a simple resonant circuit, the twin-t. Its operation diverges from the previous Tocante pieces, where finger-touch simply connected oscillator outputs to an amplifier. In Zenert, finger-touch injects the zener noise into the inputs of the flavoring circuits. So instead of a number of discrete symbols at its rim, Zenert has a band of copper tracing, scripted to mimic the waveform of noise. The inner nodes, for circuit bending on Thyris, Bistab and Phashi, are now the injection points for each resonance. The resonators on Zenert share the same tuning-by-capacitor scheme, establishing continuity with the previous ones. Thus Tocante shares a two-faced nature with its nemesis, Ieaskul F. Mobenthey; looking backward to previous designs for the general framework and manifesto, but looking forward to new ways to break out of the mold.
The Tocante line of musical instruments is "about" and "touching" the materials of electronics. Each touchpad represents a pitch according to industry "preferred numbers," chosen by old wartime engineers for non-musical purposes. Here they form a unique and haunting musical scale, not unlike that of a gamelan or the neutral intervals of Persian music. Beyond these base pitches, three golden sandrodes flank each touchpad; touching these androgynous nodes yields intermodulation, pitch and timbral shifts, and emergent chaotic masses. The instruments come in three flavors: thyris the triangle, bistab the square, and phashi the circle. The oscillators sound like a bowed string, a most powerful clarinet, and a howling serene whistle, respectively. Each responds to touch differently. Solar panels charge the onboard batteries, that power the oscillators and a speaker. They are the perfect self-contained instrument for nightly music at the campground.



youtube videos!

In the Curry Chair
Uses of Zener Noise
Rolzer

Historical