FishFace

Yeah, I guess it looks cool. Tho I think lots of instruments, and playing them, look cool :P

I don’t think you really answered (or even whether you were trying to).

I don’t think randomly going off-pitch is an aesthetic goal; I think if you wanted to do that you could easily, in an electric instrument, introduce a random pitch bend. No-one ever does… What people do do is introduce intentional pitch bends - vibrato is an obvious example, but also pushing the tuning of certain intervals outside what the typical equal-tempered distances would be.

The reason I asked the question above the way I did is because it seems universally acknowledged that intonation on the theremin synthesiser is significantly harder than on a fretless string-instrument, which affords the same expressiveness in pitch. Unless there is genuinely an advantage to its setup (and, again, randomly bad pitch is not one IMO) should we not want to make it easier?

I, of course, was not saying I demanded perfect intonation, which does not exist. But intonation that I, an at-best-moderately critical listener, can tell is way off, is not what I would aim for and I have heard that in a professional recording.

Why don’t I reframe it: why would you not want an instrument which is like the theremin synthesiser but which instead of placing the hands in free space you place them on some kind of board? How does it get worse?

Muscle memory is not enough when playing a string instrument, so I can’t imagine it is when playing the theremin synthesiser either! Muscle memory gets you in the right ball-park but you need tactile cues as well as to listen to be as accurate as possible. Typing on a touchscreen keyboard gives you visual cues (it’s usually close to where you’re looking, closer than a physical keyboard) and I believe accuracy suffers compared to a keyboard with its tactile feedback (that is, if your fingers are off, you feel that you’re hitting the edges of the keys).

It seems to me that anything you can do in the free air you should be able to do with an appropriately-scaled slider or other control system. I was enamoured of the theremin synthesiser when I first heard about it, but when I realised it is just using the hand position to affect two single capacitance values, rather than anything more complicated, I was disappointed!

Do you unplug your keyboard to use a gui or something?

I always thought the theremin was an overly impractical synthesiser. Even having the two control axes controlled by wheels or rods would make more sense.

I play cello and it’s notable that hitting a note when you have to arrive there by sliding the finger into position is a lot easier than when you have to place the finger in the correct position from the air (during a shift - the latter is fine if the whole hand is in position)

That is to say, having a tactile reference is better than waving your arms around in the air. This was reinforced for me when I heard a theremin recording by a pro and the intonation was noticeably bad.

It’s a shame people downvote this instead of replying.

The guy’s in favour of rent freezes, so there’s one policy that ain’t gonna work long term. Free buses OTOH, sounds great.

He can be the best choice but not be perfect ya know

That sounds like a level of detail it is not necessarily useful to go into with most people. I never experienced anyone non-technical complaining about cloud products, so it would just be proselytising about what to me is a hobby/passion project.

(Not that I’m big into self hosting, but to the extent I am)