Wiardgroup

On Apr 14, 2009, at 11:09 AM, Gary Chang wrote:

> I always had thought that the Buchla 200e should have been made this  
> way - an analog sound path with modules with digital guts that,  
> instead of being complicated and finite digital hardware, had a  
> firewire or parallel interface to a PC, so that there would be no  
> limit to the digital side of the system....


I can appreciate this aesthetic, but I'm not sure I would like to use  
it. The immediacy of a piece of dedicated hardware can be really  
great. I find knowing that "this physical thing does that" a good  
thing. Having the synthesis functionality split between some hardware  
and software running on a general purpose computer has the potential  
to take me "out of the moment," I think. I also seem to function  
better with some limits, but that's probably just me.

I do run a system where the note-level stuff and the gesture-level  
stuff is running on a computer. These get transmitted over MIDI. I can  
see wanting to use something like Volta to improve this bandwidth, but  
there would have to be more channels of this data than is currently  
available with existing interfaces, and it would be nice if there was  
a standard for representing this sort of data.

OSC is close, and I have hope for HD MIDI, should it ever see the  
light of day.

- C

Chris Muir
cbm@well.com	
http://www.xfade.com