This is gonna accidentally activate some old forgotten MKULTRA code-key in some poor fella’s amygdala and bang!, they’ve Manchurian Candidated Sonic the Hedgehog
The first time I saw it, I thought about playing a drumkit and whistling a bassline at the same time, with someone else on guitar and vocals, making a full rock sound with two people. But then I was too lazy to try it.
There been some people doing the whole "one man band" thing with a back pack drum, guitar and harmonica. I bet someone crazy enough could do one instrument per limb + harmonica and maybe even a theremin with some remaining appendage too.
I think looking cool matters a lot in live music, maybe even more than the actual music. Blowing into a harmonica while carrying a backpack full of cutlery looks really dorky. But two people with drums+whistling and guitar+vocals can be made to look cool.
In case you haven't seen it, Imitone's patent is US20170098112A1 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170098112A1/en). This one's from 2017 and is still active, and it's for a periodicity analysis system. Hopefully it's not directly relevant to your synth.
That patent is about a particular way of implementing a low-latency pitch tracking algorithm. My tool uses a different pitch tracking algorithm based on zero crossings. It's much simpler and far from novel.
A big difference is that Imitone works well with singing, whereas my algorithm only does a good job with whistling. On the other hand, my algorithm is lower latency when given a whistle as input.
I wouldn't expect MIDI to be a good fit, and when I experimented with it a few years ago I wasn't able to get anything I liked. Pitch and volume are continuous, and while this can be encoded in MIDI it's awkward. If you send too many updates you can overwhelm the synth, and if you slide a single note too far it will re-trigger the note. Also when the sound starts you know "there's whistling" before you have a great estimate of the pitch, but MIDI wants to know the initial tone (and many voices have tuned onsets).
This is gonna accidentally activate some old forgotten MKULTRA code-key in some poor fella’s amygdala and bang!, they’ve Manchurian Candidated Sonic the Hedgehog
The first time I saw it, I thought about playing a drumkit and whistling a bassline at the same time, with someone else on guitar and vocals, making a full rock sound with two people. But then I was too lazy to try it.
There been some people doing the whole "one man band" thing with a back pack drum, guitar and harmonica. I bet someone crazy enough could do one instrument per limb + harmonica and maybe even a theremin with some remaining appendage too.
I think looking cool matters a lot in live music, maybe even more than the actual music. Blowing into a harmonica while carrying a backpack full of cutlery looks really dorky. But two people with drums+whistling and guitar+vocals can be made to look cool.
This is why I love playing for contra dancing: no one cares what the musicians look like.
Laurie Anderson, with some of her bespoke live MIDI instruments (no actual cutlery AFAIK), got pretty close.
Very cool idea. It would be nice if you could enable your camera and then control mod/pitch with head up/down left/right motions.
Sounds a bit like imitone https://imitone.com/ (I have no affiliation)
FYI, Imitone has a patent, I don't know what it covers or claims though.
The relevant patent is from 1986, long expired: https://www.jefftk.com/p/ugo-contis-whistle-controlled-synth...
In case you haven't seen it, Imitone's patent is US20170098112A1 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170098112A1/en). This one's from 2017 and is still active, and it's for a periodicity analysis system. Hopefully it's not directly relevant to your synth.
That patent is about a particular way of implementing a low-latency pitch tracking algorithm. My tool uses a different pitch tracking algorithm based on zero crossings. It's much simpler and far from novel.
A big difference is that Imitone works well with singing, whereas my algorithm only does a good job with whistling. On the other hand, my algorithm is lower latency when given a whistle as input.
This is something I think about making every time I sit in front of my PC - thank you and I look forward to trying it!
How feasible would it be to add MIDI out support to this?
I often find my improvised melodies are more interesting when I whistle them, so this would be a handy feature.
I wouldn't expect MIDI to be a good fit, and when I experimented with it a few years ago I wasn't able to get anything I liked. Pitch and volume are continuous, and while this can be encoded in MIDI it's awkward. If you send too many updates you can overwhelm the synth, and if you slide a single note too far it will re-trigger the note. Also when the sound starts you know "there's whistling" before you have a great estimate of the pitch, but MIDI wants to know the initial tone (and many voices have tuned onsets).
But if you want to try it, checking out https://github.com/jeffkaufman/whistle-synth and asking Claude or Codex to add MIDI support would probably work!
there's the artinoise re.corder which is blown and fingered but only generates MIDI (via bluetooth).
It seems like it will be fun but my headphones just come in under the activation threshold, but I can't see a way to add some input gain
Try setting the gate to a higher number?
Sweet!