Principium pt.2: the Idea

pics of progress to follow
for now, here's yet another funky preliminary flowchart! yay!

Principium - prototyping

got an interesting question. Vaast Colson, Artiste Extraordinaire, asked me if i would like to have a go at producing a musical interpretation of one of his works. well, a couple of 'em. the work in question is called principium, and basically consists of tiny round paper stickers. i'm guessing he's done hundreds of these, and some of them have been arranged in two neat little booklets.

(click image to expand.)

in all honesty, i was most interested in the leftover patterns on the original sticker sheets. an 8x12 colourful matrix.. yells 'sequencer' to me!

after much trial and error and talking back and forth, i've got half an idea of what i want. since the stickers are either on or off the paper, i want an 8x12 switching matrix (that is, 96 switches either on or off.) this should control 6 oscillators, one for each colour - top row of each colour would be left channel, bottom row right channel.

ideally, i'm thinking 6 sawtootch oscillators, each with their own 2 VCA's (left and right) and possibly an envelope generator each. haven't deicided on the sound generating part yet, really, because getting the visual aspect of that matrix right became sort of a Big Thing. I won't sleep well until that's settled.

i tried getting my hands on some of the switches 4ms uses in their VCA Matrix - the yellow buttons. unfortunately, i'm not about to have 2000 of them custom made in china, only need 12 per colour, so no go.
i found similar ones at mouser (thanks for the help, Dann!) but they don't supply all the colours i need. i tried switching out the LED inside one of them and i was lucky to even get it back together in a half decent way. no way am i doing that 96 times.

aah, fuck buttons. buttons are boring anyway. in true sticker fashion, i'm now going for -tadaaa- magnets and proximity switches. gotta love the mouser catalogue.

will update for progress and further decisions.