this dynamic also plays out within Scandinavia. there's a hilarious thing in Sweden where people say things like "well, you know in Stockholm you don't *really* get winter"

It is definitely an American English thing but it is not new! It’s the past participle of ”get”. It’s from Middle English, but it got dropped in (most) British English some time ago. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gotten

this is almost as good as the Dutch word for "baseball", which I am overjoyed to reveal is "honkbal"

I posted this on /r/synthesizers, and hooo boy that was a treat

Performative now just means “doing something in public” and “liminal” is an empty swimming pool or something

yes I am an academic and this is what as known as "research"

In conclusion: my plan is to make one more iteration with a good PCB and enclosure for myself. I'll have to order a minimum number of PCBs, so that could be a chance to make some for sale. I'll need to track down more Gametraks though...and price is a whole other thread, I think!

but MOST important is the string controller. It is a salvaged thing, and Gametraks are increasingly difficult to find, especially the rev2 that are easier to hack. So any batch I make for sale would have to be *extremely* limited, which is too bad for both financial and gatekeeping reasons

Also, what about power sockets? Or USB power? I'm using barrel socket now, mainly because I feel like the little USB socket on the microcontroller is fairly fragile. But maybe USB is more standard nowadays, who knows. This kind of project forces me to think about what *other* people want 😅

implementing headphone output or microphone input isn't impossible of course, but it's not really my specialty and I probably wouldn't do it very well. I'm also not sure what types of sockets people would want. I might go for dual 1/4" input and output in the next iteration.

For example: the instrument currently uses line-level input and output only. No headphone output, no microphone or instrument input. To use this machine you definitely need a mixer, or some combination of devices with preamps. Is that...ok? My feeling is that means quite a lot of people can't use it

I'm now fielding a lot of requests to buy one. I'm not against this per se, though I think people generally underestimate how much work it is to take something from "this is a great machine that I can use" to "this is a machine that anyone can use".

Also possibly just how satisfying it is to map horizontal movement to a filter. evolutionary biologists could probably explain that moving our hands back and forth to control a resonant low pass filter helped our ancestors avoid being eaten by saber tooth tigers

I posted this thing on instagram and was taken aback by how popular it was. Why?! I suspect it is a combination of the immediacy of interaction + clear relationship of physical movement to time

The string part is salvaged from an old Gametrak controller, which was a pre-Wii motion capture system for console and PC gaming from around 2006. They are easy to hack! I have used them for years to make musical pigsties and caterpillar simulators and football game sound machines and the like