Physical Synthesizers

Playing around on my Eurorack system today, and remembering the work of one of my fantastic former postgrad students Natalie, I pondered the idea of a Russolo-inspired physical/acoustic modular synthesizer as the basis for a 3-D, modular, sound-generating ‘city’.

I thought I’d start with what a physical synthesizer might look like, using ChatGPT and p5.js to develop and iterate ideas, I arrived at the below:

and in p5:js, a quick prototype of this, one-module per function, looked like:

Three simple patches were developed (below) and some bugs in the code were ironed out.

With this basis, I then started to develop the 3-D structure. This was similar to my previous generative modernist cities, but with the modules prepared to fit into the 10×10×10 grid and the audio started, it was clear that they were too small and the audio too simple (below) - the synthesizer patch needed to be more expansive and more complex.

Extending the synthesizer patch as a chain through the 3-D form (below) helped, but it could still only produce essentially a single sound.

Next, up to 6 chains, each individually coloured, could be called, and levels set for pitched/unpitched elements:

The latest version, which you can see a short video of here and an image of below decouples the rate of one chain from the next and adds some other parameters to increase variety. You can try it at: https://russolo-ish-city.netlify.app/