linusakesson.net

Forum comments in chronological order

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for what people (other than myself) write in the forums. Please report any abuse, such as insults, slander, spam and illegal material, and I will take appropriate actions. Don't feed the trolls.

Jag tar inget ansvar för det som skrivs i forumet, förutom mina egna inlägg. Vänligen rapportera alla inlägg som bryter mot reglerna, så ska jag se vad jag kan göra. Som regelbrott räknas till exempel förolämpningar, förtal, spam och olagligt material. Mata inte trålarna.

Oct 2010

Making the Chipophone

paulj0557
Mon 4-Oct-2010 21:53
the thing you wrote about the pedal struck me as a very creative solution back in the days. friggin awesome to use photo sensitivity in this context. good to see the love you have for life, music, technology and with everything that you do. cheers!

Did you know that Morley guitar pedals ( the big chrome ones) all used the light-bulb/curtain method for their foot pedals? The pedals were all 110V AC and the AC light bulb for the red power indicator served as the light source for this make shift 'opto- resistor'. If the power light was out then you knew the pedal wouldn't work. On ebay I once bought a Morley Wah/volume pedal for $15 because the owner said " It was working and then one day the light went out. Selling as-is."
Unlike potentiometers that wear out over time and become scratchy the photo cells do not. Craig Anderton designed a mod intended for a Crybaby wah that instead of 'defacing' it and making it optical, he built a tiny circuit that isolated the pedals original pot from the circuit and used it to control a variable resistor in his circuit. So regardless of how scratchy its resistive element became the pedal would still sound normal. Don't know where I saw it, but it could be handy in rare instances. Personally I'd just change out the pot with a good Allen/Bradley one.

Think Twice III

Anonymous
Tue 5-Oct-2010 06:05
Hi Linus,

Totally awesome organ you have there! "Powered by 6581" :-)
Thanks for taking interest in my tune for Think Twice III.. - You played it LIVE almost to the absolute note and effects! KUDOOS to you !!

In the last bit of my C64 programming we built Dual-SIDs into our machines. And that gave me 6 channels to play with, plus the effect of Stereo.. And to top it off I would channel the output through a sound-processor that would sample and add some "reverberation" or "echo" effects to the sound which made it sound really fantastic..

Gee those were the best times hey?

Keep up the great work and let me know when you take another one of my tunes to perform? – I am flattered!

Jeroen Kimmel

Analysis of the lyrics of "Voices"

Anonymous
Wed 6-Oct-2010 11:00
Could it be like this?:
The old man is in fact Jesus himself. And He had no "good matter"...he was a rebell (remeber Jesus in the Jerusalem market place). Jesus was driven by the love for mankind and couldn't just sit down and stare when the priest perverted the love of God. Since the christian congregation often is refered as "the bride of Jesus" that "bride" became a widow in the very moment when Jesus drank the wine in Getsemane (the poison?). As I recall, Jesus prayed to God and cried "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me" as if he drank his on death. And when the protagonist doubt that Easter is coming, he is refering to the resurrection of Christ and that it might never happend, thus leaving the Christianity on its own. And the Jesus kind of Christianity was forever lost.

A case against syntax highlighting

lft
Linus Åkesson
Fri 8-Oct-2010 07:05

Exolon wrote:

I don't get your argument against training wheels (or coloured stickers on piano keys for beginners).

You suggest that it's worse than useless because learners have to "unlearn" things after they graduate to training-wheels-free mode.

But that's not a problem if this unlearning process is quicker than the time saved in learning to ride the bicycle, and I would suggest that it is. When you add some kind of training wheels to a task, it's always a trade-off. The brain is extremely good at adapting and if you can break up one complex learning task into many small ones which are easier to master, humans can and do reassemble those small tasks into the larger performance without undue difficulty.

This is why when learning tough piano pieces, dance moves or martial arts forms, we practice them in small isolated segments before putting the segments together. For example, when learning a piano piece you might practice two bars at a time, hands separately, then together, and then one line at a time and so on. Breaking down the tasks, mastering the individual stages and then composing them back together is often much more efficient than brute-force learning the higher-level skill in a monolithic fashion.

We can use mnemonics and stickers and training wheels to help us build those skills on a more modular scale, and we can still master the high-level skill afterwards.
We can have our cake and eat it too.

I agree completely in the general sense. To learn a complex thing, we must break it down into smaller parts, as the brain is able to reassemble the parts later.

In the case of training wheels, I would argue that the smaller problem (riding a bike with training wheels) is not a part of the larger problem (riding a bike without training wheels), because the child is trained to compensate for imbalance by leaning in the wrong direction.

The risk with stickers on piano keys is that the student picks up an undesired chain of associations. The goal is to be fluent in this mapping: Sheet music -> Idea of what it sounds like -> Knowing how that plays out on the keyboard -> Motor skills. A common, but unfortunate, situation is this: Sheet music -> Knowing how that plays out on the keyboard -> Motor skills -> Idea of what it sounds like. It's very hard to break free from one of these association chains once it has been formed. Colour stickers tend to form a link between (colour annotated) sheet music and knowing how it plays out on the keyboard, so they will aid in forming the wrong association chain.
lft
Linus Åkesson
Fri 8-Oct-2010 07:22
As a not-too-far-offtrack comment: Do Bibles with "The Words of Jesus in Red" add or subtract?

Another thought, having read all the comments (and the article ;): Does the (computer) language being syntax highlighted matter? I find it more helpful for C/C++ and Tex/LaTex, almost useless for eLisp/Lisp/Scheme and Basic.

My opinion is that having one person's lines printed in a different colour would distract the reader from everything else in the book. However, it is not equivalent to syntax highlighting, because it doesn't emphasize information that is already there syntactically. It would be a case of semantic highlighting, and in most cases a completely useless one, although there might be cases where it clarifies who is speaking. The same effect is used by Terry Pratchett in the Discworld novels, where Death speaks in small capital letters.

I don't mind highlighting per se, when used to mark search results or in the output of grep. In the case of ls, it communicates new information (although aesthetically I prefer the suffix style of ls -F).

Regarding different languages, I would say it depends on whether there are any semantics. Markup languages are sometimes used as a tool to describe structure, without any intricate semantics to understand, and in those cases syntax highlighting wouldn't hurt as much. But if the markup language is used to markup proper text, then the semantics of that text needs all the attention it can get.

TeX poses another interesting problem, which is ligatures. Are you aware that the parser treats certain pairs of letters differently than their constituents? "ff", "fl", "--" and several others. From the point of view of the parser, these are clearly a specific kind of syntactic element. Should they be marked in a different colour? Also, in TeX it is possible to change the lexical kind of any character. You can instruct the lexer to treat the letter y as a backslash, and do this for just a part of the file. Such a change can be effected from inside a macro. A proper syntax highlighter would have to keep track of this.

Making the Chipophone

lft
Linus Åkesson
Fri 8-Oct-2010 07:23
Really looking great! I'm very impressed!

Keep up the good work!

Cheers,

Reyn Ouwehand

Thank you Reyn!

Reverberations

lft
Linus Åkesson
Fri 8-Oct-2010 07:25
Thinking about it, the one part of the acoustics of the organ you're missing is that every pipe is in a different location, so affected differently by the room.

Theoretically speaking, if you were to try it live, you could have seperate amplification for each chip, split into bands using several band-pass filters, and then individual speakers each representing a bundle of related pipes.

But I'm thinking too much now, amn't I?

How can thinking too much ever be a problem? =)

Think Twice III

lft
Linus Åkesson
Fri 8-Oct-2010 07:31
Hi Linus,

Totally awesome organ you have there! "Powered by 6581" :-)
Thanks for taking interest in my tune for Think Twice III.. - You played it LIVE almost to the absolute note and effects! KUDOOS to you !!

In the last bit of my C64 programming we built Dual-SIDs into our machines. And that gave me 6 channels to play with, plus the effect of Stereo.. And to top it off I would channel the output through a sound-processor that would sample and add some "reverberation" or "echo" effects to the sound which made it sound really fantastic..

Gee those were the best times hey?

Keep up the great work and let me know when you take another one of my tunes to perform? – I am flattered!

Jeroen Kimmel

Hello Jeroen!

Thanks for your kind feedback! I'm glad that you liked my interpretation.

Also, just to clarify, there is no actual SID chip in the Chipophone. The sound is coming from an 8-bit microcontroller that I've programmed to generate similar sounds.

Making the Chipophone

Anonymous
Thu 14-Oct-2010 17:24
Most impressive good sir. Personally I'm working on chip concertina, this has been helpful and iformative indeed.

Greetings from Iceland

Delta

Anonymous
Fri 15-Oct-2010 18:17
Absolutely superb.

Making the Chipophone

Anonymous
Fri 15-Oct-2010 20:54
пиздец, да это охуенно, чувак!
Anonymous
Sat 16-Oct-2010 15:59
How much to fly you, and your organ to Canada to preform for my birthday?? :D


Great work, thanks for sharing your amazing talent with all of us!

Autosokoban

Anonymous
Sat 16-Oct-2010 19:39
Nice Generator :-)
I found
http://www.linusakesson.net/games/autosokoban/?v=1&seed=722222541&level=768
really easy, but for
http://www.linusakesson.net/games/autosokoban/?v=1&seed=722222541&level=6
I needed several tries.

Delta

Anonymous
Sun 17-Oct-2010 00:45
i am most impressed by his clean and hole-less socks!

DuckTales, The Moon

Anonymous
Sun 17-Oct-2010 19:52
Amazing work! You are very talented my friend!!

The Chipophone

Anonymous
Sun 24-Oct-2010 00:53
Wonderful instrument!

Making this project open source or into an Instructable would be even more fantastic! I know there are others out there, like me, that really wish we could make one too, but if they ARE like me then they have enough know-how to follow instructions but not enough to build it from scratch without guidance.

If you ever feel like sharing your genius, Please do not hesitate!

Craft

Anonymous
Sun 24-Oct-2010 03:32
For all you guys interested in prototyping your circuits on this kind of PCBs (often called "perfboards"), a quick google search gave me this two links:

DIY Layout Creator (written in Java -> Free)
http://www.synthdiy.com/show/?id=2489

Lochmaster
http://www.abacom-online.de/html/lochmaster.html

I'm currently testing Lochmaster, and I must say that it's way better than nothing. It is certainly limited but one shouldn't wish a full-featured suite for simple circuit prototyping.

These two taken from this site:
http://www.sphere.ws/blog/?p=139

I hope this links are useful.

- Netshark

The TTY demystified

Anonymous
Mon 25-Oct-2010 13:14
Nithin: thanks for the page....i got a lot of information from ur web page...

Making the Chipophone

Anonymous
Mon 25-Oct-2010 14:13
How much would it cost to have you build me one?

I'll build you one for $15,000. :-P

Legend of Zelda

Anonymous
Mon 25-Oct-2010 15:25

lft wrote:

wow. The only way I can tell that it is actually him playing is his occasional (and few) mistakes. I am impressed.

If you like this, check out this woman playing entire musical scores like Star Wars and Indiana Jones on an electone. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16oaGSltUPE&feature=player_embedded

Yes, I agree. I'm aware of her work and she's an inspiration for sure.

She didn't invent the Electone. Or wrote the software for it. It isn't nearly as epic as Linus, but it was ok.

The Chipophone

jimqode
Jim Qode
Tue 26-Oct-2010 06:51
Hi there Linus,

I was extremely amazed by your hardware chiptune project and now, as if it is possible, I am even more amazed with the Chipophone project. I have absolutely no idea how you fit all that operations on a 38khz interrupt along with the high-level controllers. I would really love to see the code.

Please enlighten me on these chipophone related questions:

1. I guess your output is a ladder DAC. How many bits?
2. Are your oscillators lookup table based? If not, how did you implement the noise?
3. Are there any filters in the Chipophone? If so are they implemented in software or are they analog filters?
4. At the begging of the Delta video I see you programming a sequence. Is that functionality implemented in the synth uC or MIDI controller chip?

Keep up the good work!
Anonymous
Tue 26-Oct-2010 19:51
Wow.

Phasor

Anonymous
Thu 28-Oct-2010 02:32
tremendo loco¡ te fuistes a la mierda¡
muy bueno¡¡¡¡¡¡¡

The Chipophone

Anonymous
Thu 28-Oct-2010 02:41
naaaaaaaaaaa¡ loco sos de la nasa¡im pre cio nante¡

Legend of Zelda

Anonymous
Sat 30-Oct-2010 22:31
looking at a propeller forum at parallax where they linked to you
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?t=121832&highlight=stone&page=3
they linked to your turbulence.

Great playing. I'm so jealous of your abilities!
IncVoid

Romance from Chopin's 1st Piano Concerto

Anonymous
Sun 31-Oct-2010 04:37
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKPORUMh7nA

Earthworm Quest

Anonymous
Sun 31-Oct-2010 07:37
=)))