Re: Demonstration of alphaSyntauri system

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

N.N. Thayer wrote:
> Wasn't sure whether everyone saw this - it's a demo of the nigh-
> mythical alphaSyntauri music synthesis system:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBOqzHQObnw
>
> I've seen it discussed here occasionally, but this is the first time
> I've actually seen one in action!

The keyboard sounds a lot "clunkier" than it actually was,
partly because of microphone placement and partly because
I think foam damping strips have disintegrated over the years,
causing noise upon key bottoming and release.

The keys were sprung, but not weighted, so it was like many
synthesizer keyboards.

The sound of the AlphaSyntauri was extremely versatile and
quite smooth, largely because of the Mountain Music System--
a two-card DMA-based 8-bit wavetable synthesizer with 16
channels (8 mixed to each stereo channel).

The DMA-based approach leaves the 6502 largely free, so that
it can implement the attack-decay-sustain-release envelope
and timbre variations, including vibrato and tremolo.

For comparison, my software synthesizer code implements a
no-hardware, processor-based, 5-bit wavetable synthesizer
with one channel (per Apple II, if a multi-computer system
is used).

The processor-based synthesis fully utilizes the 6502, so
that no other processing is possible while sound is being
synthesized.

-michael

NadaNet 3.1 for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page:  http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/

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