An edition of three, built from the circuits extracted
from Speak & Maths.
They are (from the left): Mathindex,
Math, and Math03.
They feature custom-painted enclosures, a 6 position multi-switch to choose
which of the 5 Speak & Math "games" to play (Solve It, Word
Problems, Greater Than/Less Than, Write It, Number Stumper, and the last
position used to mute the sound), a momentary looper/glitch button (when
momentarily pressed, whatever sound is heard will play as a sorta 4-bar
loop), a human contact resistance point, an optical resistor, and a DPDT
toggle switch to choose which state to play (loopy-glitch (left), Normal,
or optical (right)). In optical mode, it dumps its ROM phrases, phonemes
and tones, making for some very interesting continuous noise. In addition,
thru the clear window can be seen the LED display, which displays the
name of the game setting in normal or loop mode, and in optical mode,
plays a little glitched-out LED movie, the characters and random bits
of light controlled by light and voltage. Very neat!
The gadget will play itself for many minutes in proper lighting conditions,
with subtle control over changes by using your hand shadows or a pocket
LED light. It is very volatile (prone to crashing) in optical mode, thus
the necessary red reset button on the front.
The notch cut out of the side is for wallwart or battery pack power access,
and 1/8" minijack out. The bottom of the gadget has a speaker grill
pattern drilled with the speaker mounted above and within, and tiny rubber
feet to elevate the unit, allowing the sound to come out of the bottom
of the gadget, resonating off the surface it sits on, effectively using
tabletops or other surfaces as amplification.
You can find a few construction shots here,
for those of you that are into that sort of thing.
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Current Status: |
Mathindex: Owned by Boy-Genius Peter
Washburn (index) of The
Univac Index, God's
Grandparents, Modrn Univac, and some time Big
City Orchestra conspirator. Given as Birthday gift. Nice!
Math: Owned by me (univac). I put it thru its paces
regularly and irregularly.
Math03: Was for sale or trade. Has
been committed to by Rob of Big City Orchestra.
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Audio Bits: |
MathDigiNoise.mp3 A
nice bit of noisy bits.
MathFraga01.mp3 , 02 ,
and 03 Many of the loops
generated by the Maths sound like digital froggy Ragas.
MathGeniiHCRP.mp3 This bit shows
the pitch power of the human contact resistance point.
MathNoisyFraga.mp3 A fraga, but
noisy.
MathOptSeizure04.mp3 , 05 ,
06 , and 07 These
demonstrate the digital freak-out ROM dump when optical mode is engaged.
MathOShit.mp3 Believe it or not, I
was able to get Math to spew out "Oh, Shit" at some point in optical
mode. Wow. Either it is in there stored in its memory waiting for someone
like me to find, or some weird concatenation of phonemes formed this.
Very funny!
MathPopcorn.mp3 Sounds like a digital
popcorn machine.
MathSpingy.mp3 A neat little minimal
spingy loop. |