For those who regularly (or even no so regularly) like to mess around with noise, you know that the equipment that comes with it is sometimes cumbersome and often comes with annoying fixed interfaces. That’s one of the things SketchSynth, a new project coming out of Carnegie Mellon, seeks to address. By using Openframeworks (a popular C++ toolkit) and some pen and paper, SketchSynth allows you to sketch out your own customized, fully functioning midi sound mixer.According to Billy Keyes, the creator of the project, the program operates in two modes, “edit” and “play”, and is able to recognize three basic types of drawn controls: momentary buttons, toggle switches, and sliders. Limiting the interface to recognize only three commands is necessary, Keyes said, because since you’re drawing on paper, you can’t have a complicated instruction set anyways.By necessity, the visual language SketchSynth can handle is limited to three input types, illustrated below. Despite this, I think it covers most control possibilities: many knobs are just sliders that take up less space and many buttons are just switches in a different form. Outputs, like gauges and indicator lights, are also missing, but with a general purpose surface it's unclear what they would display.But besides being ridiculously rad (and opening up a new world to customizable sound mixer), my first impression of this project was “now what?” Like many other new technologies, SketchSynth currently resides in that strange limbo of “would be cool in real life but I still need all this other shit that I don’t have to make this thing work.” (In this case, a projector, camera, and computer.)The promise of replacing our hardware with software that can turn our materials into anything is just as promising as the late 90’s when everybody thought we were finally going to free ourselves of our dependence on physical materials by creating a “paperless society.” Of course, by now we know that the promise of physical materials being replaced by digital architecture was a bunch of bull, and really only left us more dependent on our earthly materials, corporate infrastructures, and human labor.At the very least you’d think creating a world run on computation would at least help us reduce the amount of stuff we carry around, but in the end it hasn’t. It’s only increased the amount of stuff we have to deal with on a daily basis.But I digress. It would be easy to continue rambling about humanity being shackled to digital material, but at the end of the day being able to draw a fully functional working machine is pretty freaking incredible. To think about just the materiality of software is doing this thing a pretty big disservice. After all, the idea behind Keyes’s project wasn’t streamlining bulky midi controllers, it was about exploring the potentials of the interface. And, really, computing on paper is pretty gloriously irreverent, isn’t it?
Advertisement