Re: Infinity Guitar

[kflint@annihilist.com (Kim Flint)]

>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
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