17 Feb, 2024
Organizers of ContinuuCon 2024, scheduled for April 26–28 in the Pittsburgh suburb of Carnegie, Pennsylvania, let us know that tickets are now available.
ContinuuCon is an international conference that focuses on the Haken Continuum and instruments that share its EaganMatrix synth engine, including the Haken Continuum Fingerboard, ContinuuMini, EaganMatrix Eurorack module and Expressive E Osmose synthesizer.
The three-day event features an opening reception and two days of workshops, seminars and performances. Musicians from around the world attend and participate.
Organizers also announced a Call for Presentations. Presentations that incorporate some performance aspect are preferred. Presentations can be 30, 45, or 60 minutes in length. See the event website for details.
ContinuuCon 2024 tickets are available now for $280, through March 25 (normally $320). The ticket covers entry to all conference events, including the opening night reception and two full days of presentations, workshops, and demonstrations. Tickets also include two catered lunches.
17 Feb, 2024
Developers of Tempera – a tactile, cross-sample granular synthesizer and resampler – let us know that they’ve released firmware v1.5, an update that adds new features, along with ‘polishing’ and bugfixes.
What they shared about the most significant fixes in Tempera v1.5:
New per-emitter Tone filters
If you find that it’s easy to overwhelm your mix with all the grains and emitters, the new Tone filter is one way to deal with it. It consists of a stereo pair of 1-pole LP and HP filters and it has two parameters: Width and Center. It can work as a sweepable “DJ style” filter, or a smooth bandpass to give each emitter a place in the mix. Also it is a modulator destination! Big thanks for this goes to our Discord community who was key in finding a good way to do this in a way that’s useful and flowing with the rest of Tempera’s UI.
New modulator destinations
The v1.5 firmware adds a couple of of new modulator destinations: per-emmiter Volume, Grain size, Grain Density, and Tone. Over time we’ll keep adding more of these. Which parameters should be made modulatable in the next round?
Picking an audio slice from a long audio file
It is now possible to load a long audio file into Tempera (up to 5 minutes) and pick an up to 11s window from it to load into a Track. The new firmware also fixes some bugs with regard to audio file loading, and now supports various sample rates and bit depths.
Other things in a gist:
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- There’s now also a Random Name Generator to save time when saving canvases (no more AAAA.canvas!) Turtle Blues? Boring Sonata? It’s all in there!
- Many new new global settings, like Velocity curve, Max volume, Audition volume, new recording mode Mix which blends half of old with half of new, adjustable Display brightness
- Small things, like Round button + keyboard to show/hide the overlay keyboard, and a new Chromatic scale option
- New Horizontal overlay keyboard variant
See the Tempera newsletter for details.
16 Feb, 2024
Instrument designer Keith Baxter let us know that his latest design, the Zen Flute, is now available.
The Zen Flute is described as a “mouth theremin”, that maps the pressure and shape of a performer’s mouth to the pitch output. It provides USB and analog outputs of the on-board procedural flute synthesizer, along with USB MIDI for controlling other MIDI devices or software.
The instrument was First Prize winner in the 2023 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, an annual invent that celebrates “innovative musical instruments at the intersection of musicality, design, and engineering”.
Features:
- Housing: Solid color PVC with cast acrylic end panels (white or black)
- Processor: Teensy 4.0 ARM Cortex-M7 at 600 MHz
- Open Source software featuring the Faust procedural synthesizer from Grame Research Lab, France.
- Outputs: analog stereo audio (right stereo jack), USB audio (digital stereo); USB MIDI, analog monophonic pitch monitor (left jack)
- Cherry “red” fast action keyboard switches
- Includes USB cable and mini-CD with schematic, source code, instructions and hints
An example of the Zen Flute in action:
The Zen Flute is available for $320.
