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Patching With Paradiso...

From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.

Heavy synth-nerdery alert.

If you’ve been in the synth game for a while, you no doubt know about Joe Paradiso of MIT and his monster DIY modular. The video above is some basic background. I question whether it is the largest DIY modular in the world, but it is definitely large. (twss)

In any event, it recently got moved to the MIT Museum, and is constantly running, with a patch that is updated every couple weeks. You can stream the audio live, but that’s not the nifty part. They just added a feature called Patchwork, which is a module that can be controlled via the Intertubes, and alters certain aspects of the patch in real time. The main page for the synth is here, and the Patchwork control page can be found here. Note that the four buttons are not toggles; you have to hold them down to hear them. And any change takes a few seconds to show up in the audio stream. The synth also has its own Twitter feed, where Mr. Paradiso lets you know when he changes the patch.

This is the first I’ve ever seen something like this. Are there other interactive instruments that actually exist on this temporal plane (i.e. hardware) that are floating around the ’Tubes? How could this be extrapolated in to something that was musically a bit less… nerderific? (For want of a better word.)

12 comments

  1. kineticmonkey

    Here in the UK the Tate Gallery did an interactive art piece where you could fire different paintballs at a canvas via the internet, that was pretty fun, however I've never seen an audio installation like that.

  2. Solipsist Nation

    A friend who was doing research/work/fucking-around at the MIT Media Lab had some kind of noise-generator thing that you could control remotely, although you had to telnet into it and type commands to do anything so it was a little more esoteric than a web interface. I think a web interface was planned, and I don't know what happened with it, considering his somewhat flighty attention span.

  3. lazenbleep

    this happened 5 years ago

    http://haha-fresh.blogspot.com/2007/09/this-is-art.html

    i love this though, i just bumped into a mate on the patchwerk page. saved driving the 150miles to jam with him!

    #:

  4. oootini

    Not quite the same thing, but wasn't there a huge silo somewhere in Canada that you could play sounds into via the intertubes and listen to the billowy reverb recording?

  5. emeb

    @oootini - that would be the Silophone:

    http://www.silophone.net/

  6. bongo_x

    I was going to mention the Silophone, and I thought there was at least one more. I could only find references to http://www.tank-fx.de/ , which appears to be gone. I didn't really look that hard though.

  7. inteliko

    There was that big ass reverb pipe somewhere in Europe. You leave it in their dropbox and you dl the reverbed version.

  8. bongo_x

    I have a unused well in my back yard that sounds amazing (talking or banging something around it), and I was thinking about hooking up a mic and speaker and trying it out. It also happens to be directly behind my studio, about 30 feet. My laziness is incredible though. I know I will regret not doing it one day.

    bb

  9. pepezabala

    there was an installation where they installed loudspeakers into a very large industrial building and you could send soundfiles via a webpage into it. The installation had also micophones capturing the very large reverb and streaming this back into the web. You could visit the place and listen to the noises and "hello hello penis vagina"-voices coming from the internet in situ or just listen to it via stream on the internet.

    This is already a couple of years ago, so don't ask me for a link or name of the whole thing. It was situated in germany, though.

  10. bongo_x

    -pepezabala-

    That's what I was thinking of.

  11. mikebeck

    Sort of semi-related to the reverbs, I remember reading something about somebody offering to run stereo mixes through analog compressors or through tape machines or something like that. Sorry for being overly specific.

    And in honor of St Patrick's day, this weekend I'm going to refer to one of the AD delay plugins as Rick O'Shea.

  12. wquoyle

    Stelarc wired himself up to the web once so you could make him convulse with electrical impulses.

    Not *strictly* audio but I'm sure he made some noise as the group mentality that is the web went at him.

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