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Thummer™ - a new musical instrument being developed by Thumtronics Inc. of Austin, Texas

Make your own physical sweaty interactive computer music interface • While knowing very little about electronics • And only spending a few dollars. Previous research demonstrated that: • Making your own MIDI interfaces is difficult and expensive. • In fact you have to buy silly programmable EPROMs and shit.

The first basic idea of the glitch-free playback model (a better, less marketingy name is probably timer-based audio scheduling which is the term I internally use in the PA codebase) is to no longer depend on sound card interrupts to schedule audio but use system timers instead. System timers are far more flexible then the fragment-based sound card timers. They can be reconfigured at any time, and have a granularity that is independant from any buffer metrics of the sound card. The second basic idea is to use playback buffers that are as large as possible, up to a limit of 2s or 5s. The third basic idea is to allow rewriting of the hardware buffer at any time. This allows instant reaction on user-input (i.e. pause/seek requests in your music player, or instant event sounds) although the huge latency imposed by the hardware playback buffer would suggest otherwise.

Paul von Janko was born in western Hungary in 1856. He was trained as a mathematician and became a musician and engineer, studying under physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz. In 1882, he patented a new form of keyboard layout, designed to allow the player to cover a wider span of notes with each hand and to make all keys equally easy to play. Janko's keyboard drew upon earlier designs by Conrad Henfling (1708), Johann Rohleder (1791) and William Lunn (1843). He used short narrow keys akin to buttons, and stacked them up to form six tiers. The notes were arranged in whole-tone intervals. The first tier, the third and the fifth play a whole-tone scale beginning from C. The secound, fourth and sixth tiers play a whole-tone scale beginning from C#. The shape and fingering of a given scale or chord is the same in any key and the octave span is reduced to 5" as opposed to 6-1/2" on a normal piano. In 1886, RW Kurka incorporated a Janko keyboard into a piano, and Paul von Janko himself demonstrated it in Vienna, playing works by Liszt, Schubert, and Chopin.

Pretty accurate-ish timing in python   Python's time.sleep() is rather bad for accurate timing. It can sleep for less time than requested, if there's an interrupt. Or longer, depending on what the scheduler is up to.

Khagan is a live user interface builder for controling parameters via OSC.