{"id":2654,"date":"2025-10-06T04:22:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T04:22:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/?page_id=2654"},"modified":"2025-10-07T05:54:43","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T05:54:43","slug":"oddities-exhibition-kontrast-and-sumu","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/oddities-exhibition-kontrast-and-sumu\/","title":{"rendered":"Oddities Exhibition: Kontrast and Sumu \ud83e\uddfb\ud83d\udca9"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I am firmly behind innovation. The endless regurgitation of 20th century analogue sound-alikes is cowardly, ineffectual and tedious. We have enough Jupiter 8 and Space Echo clones<\/a> to populate a small village. Where able I will congratulate the very few people that keep the original spirit<\/em> of electronic music. But innovation involves risk – to be new<\/strong> is not always to be good<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the main the plugins developed by Dawesome<\/a> are excellent. They challenge the traditional interfaces, they offer a high level of control and most importantly they produce sounds that inspire new music. But sadly I find their new release Kontrast<\/em> is lacking in the third aspect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you scan through a traditional wavetable you can reproduce a wide variety of flowing and lively oscillator shapes. Each slice of the wavetable is the same set duration so you can portray it as either a landscape graph, or a 2D field with colour being the third indication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
This is how the Fairlight showed a sample back in the 80’s and we still fetishise it.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Quite rightly Dawesome say the landscape is a silly old fashioned way to show a wavetable – and once you show it as the colour chart it’s obvious that you can traverse this 2D map in many different ways – not just rolling from one end to the other. The resulting waveform could be built from a circle, or a flower shape. The wavetable is just the beginning of the synthesis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This is not new. An open source Terrain<\/em> synthesiser<\/a> has a similar process. That software has been further developed into a hardware synthesiser<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Great idea! But what does it sound like? Well, to be polite – Dawesome’s synthesisers are usually<\/em> love at first listen. Very complex but flowing and emotive. But this sounds like a ruler held in a fan and you can turn the ruler in different directions. Changing the shape of the path through the 2D space can make changes, maybe not, or enter a realm of pain that has no clear exit. To make it a circle or a flower shape is guesswork – as is changing the wavetable. It just doesn’t have a musical intuition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I reviewed KrishnaSynth<\/em><\/a> I was cool with the clunkiness of it because it was an old dog inventing new tricks. 2007 was a time when you could throw shit and see if it stuck. Maybe that’s still true, but we’ve had a lot of shits and sticks that we can compare, and say … nope. Needs more work to match the theory with the agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But also… Madrona Labs Sumu<\/em><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

While I am being cranky dad I should revisit Madrona Lab’s Sumu<\/em><\/a>. The last time I looked at it, it was near useless, demanding the computing power of ChatGPT<\/em> on a busy day and producing scratchy overloaded CPU noises that might have been what was intended? Who knows. Deleted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can hear there’s been an attempt to clean up the code or something like that – it descends into cyber farts over a longer time. But the affordance is still awful – just a menagerie of what the fuck goes where <\/em>and why does this do what?<\/em> I get that it’s an additive synthesiser. There are others<\/a>, and they don’t look like a map of the New York train system. I get that it’s rendering in 3D space. It get that it’s experimental<\/em>. What I don’t agree that it’s a inspiring interface – which Dawesome does so well. Maybe they should share a beer and talk about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am firmly behind innovation. The endless regurgitation of 20th century analogue sound-alikes is cowardly, ineffectual and tedious. We have enough Jupiter 8 and Space Echo clones to populate a small village. Where able I will congratulate the very few people that keep the original spirit of electronic music. But innovation involves risk – to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[8,13,6],"class_list":["post-2654","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","tag-modular","tag-spectral","tag-wavetable"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2654"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2664,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2654\/revisions\/2664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}