Eigenharp Pico - anyone??

[Peter Korsten]

Op 9-3-2010 7:16, Andrew Tarpinian schreef:

> I used to think this, but I think it might be the controllers. Maybe
> there has not been much advancement in new ways of creating sounds
> because we are still using an antiquated way of playing them ->
> Keyboards. Also maybe an antiquated way of composing and listening.

See, I don't believe that everything is stagnated, because we're doing 
things wrong.

Just to give a totally unconnected example. At work, we're basically a 
Java programming shop. Now, a colleague of mine decided that the error 
handling mechanism provided by Java (exceptions, which can be handled, 
and errors, which basically mean the end of the program; both are 
derived from the 'throwable' class) missed the 'application error'.

Even though that Java has existed for 15 years, and hundreds of 
thousands of people use it for software writing, and that nobody has 
ever come up with this idea, that's what he thought.

It took me about ten minutes to write a short example that showed he 
should have used run-time exceptions, part and parcel of Java, but the 
moral of this story is: if it's been done for ages, and it's been done 
by a lot of people, you should think twice before deciding that it's the 
wrong approach.

Of course, if we'd take this stand too strictly, the Music Bar would 
work by mail pigeon rather than the internet. You have to innovate when 
there's a need.

But I don't believe that the perceived lack of moving on has anything to 
do with the interface; it's probably more due to economic reasons, both 
that it's prohibitively expensive to develop a brand new instrument 
these days, that you don't get access to the big stars who would shell 
out the price of a nice car for such an instrument, and that selling 
over the internet means you have to keep your prices down. So, we get a 
lot of software instruments.

> The Eigenharp is becoming more and more interesting the more I check
> it out. Too bad the Pico is not nearly as fly as the Alpha

The Eigenharp just doesn't do it for me, just by checking the videos. 
It's still just a controller connected to a laptop.

The Chapman stick, now, that one I found fascinating, but when I played 
Gert's one, I didn't really know what to do with it (even though I've 
played a guitar a handful of times).

- Peter