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>In a message dated 96-10-19 16:21:27 EDT, you write: > >> >> I wonder what happened to the Infinity guitar. I guess it's still >cooking >> in someone's lab? >> >> >> Paolo Valladolid > >I never understood what "infinity guitar" is What is it? Any takers? > >David Kirkdorffer The Infinity was a guitar synthesizer project that we were developing at g-wiz, in conjunction with CNMAT. (Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, a research institute at UC Berkeley) The goal was to create a guitar synth that would be far, far beyond the lame junk that's available now. Rather than just figuring out what note you played and how loudly you played it, it actually analyzed HOW you played it. So you would get real timbral control over the synthesis, like a good guitar player has over the actual guitar sound. The timbral analysis would be used to control synthesizers that have much more expressive capabilities than sample-playback, like physical modeling or in our case, the additive/resynthesis techniques being developed at cnmat. Naturally, it used the ZIPI network/musical desciption language protocol that we were also developing. Personally, I hate guitar synthesizers. It's fun for two minutes while I play a note and say "golly, it comes out sounding like a digiridoo!" But then I notice myself getting bored and losing interest. The problem is that no matter how I play the note, the digiridoo, or tamborine, or whatever, sounds EXACTLY the same. All of the expressive techniques I've spent my whole life learning to do on guitar strings are totally filtered out. No thanks. The infinity was to actually use all the expressive control of the guitarist to control the synthesis, which I found quite exciting. Various greedy and stupid individuals saw the potential dollars in this, and began dickering about and tried to get it all for themselves. So naturally the whole thing got swallowed into a horrible legal black hole. The future of guitar didn't really come to a screeching halt, though, because in reality the infinity sucked. Years of development, lots of money, and the thing was no where near the aforementioned goals. It was poorly designed, with the basic architechture marred by all sorts of stupid engineering choices. Technology has passed it by; if someone were rich and foolish enough to restart that project, they would need to pretty much start over if they wanted to be anywhere near the current state of the art in audio processing. I think cnmat uses the prototypes for dsp processing. kim ______________________________________________________________________ Kim Flint | Looper's Delight kflint@annihilist.com | http://www.annihilist.com/loop/loop.html http://www.annihilist.com/ | Loopers-Delight-request@annihilist.com