SYNTHSPEX

The scripts in this repository were written to power a special exhibition at the NAMM Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad, CA, in 2019. Titled Music from the Sound Up: The Creative Tools of Synthesis, the exhibition was designed to give visitors the opportunity to learn about six fundamental concepts of audio synthesis - oscillators, additive synthesis, filters, envelopes, LFOs, and reverberation - through the process of "building a sound." Armed with an RFID-tagged token, visitors used six successive stations to build and modify a unique set of parameters for each of the concepts. For example, the second station (additive synthesis) added multiple oscillators in a harmonic series so that visitors could shape the harmonic content of their sound, the third station (filters) added a bandpass filter with accompanying Q value, and so on. The values of every parameter were recorded to the RFID tag in realtime. This allowed them to be read at subsequent stations in order to recreate the visitor's sound in the synthesizer engine, thus letting the sound travel with the visitor through the exhibition. After the last station, visitors could take their RFID token to one of four interactive instruments - a Roland digital piano, an electric guitar with a Fishman MIDI-enabled pickup, a Moog Theremini, and an Ableton Push - to "play their sound." Visitors were free to revisit any station to modify parameters, with the caveat that visiting the first station (oscillators) would wipe the values on their tokens - the assumption being that visiting the first station amounted to a "new" visit.