vwestlife
Veteran Member
Musician Paul Millar (a.k.a. Slugbug) archived this circa 1978 demo tape for an electronic music system using a SWTPC 6800 computer with custom sound generation hardware:
His description:
Mystery cassette I found in my grandmother's house in the late 90s that became the object of much fascination. My mom did her doctoral research on music computer-aided instruction using this system and later the Apple ][. The sound producing hardware (MUSOR) consisted of a SWTPC 6800 CPU interfaced with a card cage of custom TTL circuits (high frequency oscillators and discrete wavetables), which was itself controlled by a music markup language (AMUS) implemented on a Hewlett-Packard 2000 series minicomputer, which supported several terminals and MUSORs simultaneously. The sound quality is unique and pleasant to these ears, owing to a relatively flexible system of dynamic and envelope control and a (software-controlled?) asymmetric distortion circuit to reduce the squareness of the waveforms. This is most clearly demonstrated in the last couple of songs on the tape. Some papers I received ca. 2005 from one of the designers: http://slugbug.sound-club.org/information/AMUS/
His description:
Mystery cassette I found in my grandmother's house in the late 90s that became the object of much fascination. My mom did her doctoral research on music computer-aided instruction using this system and later the Apple ][. The sound producing hardware (MUSOR) consisted of a SWTPC 6800 CPU interfaced with a card cage of custom TTL circuits (high frequency oscillators and discrete wavetables), which was itself controlled by a music markup language (AMUS) implemented on a Hewlett-Packard 2000 series minicomputer, which supported several terminals and MUSORs simultaneously. The sound quality is unique and pleasant to these ears, owing to a relatively flexible system of dynamic and envelope control and a (software-controlled?) asymmetric distortion circuit to reduce the squareness of the waveforms. This is most clearly demonstrated in the last couple of songs on the tape. Some papers I received ca. 2005 from one of the designers: http://slugbug.sound-club.org/information/AMUS/