How much noise are scanners supposed to make?

[LaserWizard]

The "Sidewinder" show you saw at ILDA was probably not the best version to see. It was a several step process - I recorded the show to ADAT, sent it to Bill Benner, he played the ADAT into his Pangolin ADAT recorder, and then synced it back up to the soundtrack. I was pleased at how well the Pangolin recording worked!

The beams were set to "all white" color because we did this recording for the Orlando LDI 07 ILDA showroom, and the beam lasers were going to be green, I just wanted to make sure all the information was there. Actually the beams have a lot of colors going on.

To see the "real thing" the MIDI sequencer drives the whole system live - MIDI into Lasergraph DSP; DSP output split between scanners and speakers. I always work in two laser channels and mix the audio.

Working process - I turn the laser off, and trigger the laser events/sounds with a MIDI sequencer, work with the images, point counts, sizing, etc. in order to "tune" the sounds and get rhythms going. At this point I am just trying to make music. At any time I can turn on the laser and see a perfectly synced light show with music! It's great fun .... I've done a lot of tunes like this.

Now I am getting into more slow stuff, the faster stuff is starting to all sound the same to me. Gotta go deeper...

Here's a video of my playing the accordion with the scanner music (also triggering a sampler with percussion sounds):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e97iJIhMJ4

- Tim

[LaserWizard]

BTW - Synaesthesia simply refers to the crossing of the senses. It is not originally a trademarked band name. Iuse the word because I have always wanted the music and the light to be the same thing.

People with synaesthesia (synaesthetes?) will hear colors and see sounds! I have read that it can be quite annoying!

I did a band project a few years ago we called "Laser Synaesthesia", we triggered every aspect of the lasers and video from the synthesizers. It started me down this road in earnest. Unfortunately we did not all get along, esp. the two brother in the band!

- Tim

[Frixxion]

LOL that is awesome!

So, if I pulled the sound from that vid, and played it thru my sound card DAC, I would get the same kind of effect ? (Minus the distortion from the compression of the video)

I wanna try it

You can go around the video-compression. Tim has uploaded all his laser-acapalla's in MP3 format to his website:

http://laserpolka.com/music.html

[Things]

You can go around the video-compression. Tim has uploaded all his laser-acapalla's in MP3 format to his website:

http://laserpolka.com/music.html

Are all those sound tracks hidden laser shows too ?

[Frixxion]

Are all those sound tracks hidden laser shows too ?

It would be an interesting experiment to see if it would work . Anyone with a soundcard DAC volunteering?

[Things]

I used a sound card DAc to test it.

But since they are only 2 channel .mp3 files, you dont get blanking, + you loose abit of quality with the .mp3 compression. It works though

[LaserWizard]

One problem is that there are the outputs for two sets of scanners mixed into the soundtrack. So it probably will end up as mush!

Also, the phase information and timing is so critical for making laser images that I don't think it would survive the transition to sound and back again.

Thanks for trying! I never thought of doing that (why would I??) but I'd like to see a photo of it!

- Tim

[chad]

Tim, that is pretty cool!

I don't know what I feel more sorry for, the scanners or the power amps and speakers. I imagine that a couple of KW of 18s like square waves

chad

[300EVIL]

WOW! That's really cool! I'm gonna have to try that sometime. Nice job Tim!