[sane-devel] What about creating music with scanning devices?

[Martin Langer]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2003 at 09:56:53PM +0100, Major A wrote:
> > The basic idea is to use a scanner as music instrument and translate a scan
> > line into music notes (x-scale for differnt notes and intensity for the
> > volume). Therefore it would be nice to have a constant y value (I don't see an
> > interesting use for y!). So it would be great to read out that one y-line 
> > and produce MIDI notes until Ctrl-C is pressed. 
> 
> Just to make sure I'm getting the right ideas: you want a scanner to
> scan a single line over and over quickly so that you can synthesize
> music by moving objects above the scanner's glass surface? Sounds very
> interesting indeed!
> 

I'm not really sure, about my final goals. On one hand I can have a three
dimensional keyboard (RGB) and on the other hand I don't know how to use
it. But we will see. My first idea was playing an invisible keyboard with my
finger tips on the scanner surface, but there are more possibilities, that's
right and I don't see them all.

> > Is it possible to solve this (read out one line without y movement) in a 
> > frontend application? Or do I have to patch the backend part? Is there any
> 
> It has little to do with the frontend. Scanners are designed to scan
> whole 2D documents, so making just a frontend will not be
> enough. You'll probably have to find a scanner that can do this in
> hardware (not easy, I suppose), then probably modify its backend.

Then it would be depend on a specific scanner and a general solution would
be much nicer. Ok, I will look to the backend part of my umax, but such things
should be IMHO part of a middleware level. There is no middleware level in
the sane architecture - Is that right?

> Given that (most?) scanners weren't designed for real-time scanning,
> I'd suggest you look at video cameras instead. It should be fairly
> easy to do what you want by using a digital video camera, dissect the
> DV stream so as to take one line only, then use that to generate your
> music.

Yes. There are 1000 ideas to generate some notes, but there are not 1000 
developers to do it and the companies want to sell more hardware instead of
using existing hardware for strange things. But linux offers this general
concepts of ALSA+SANE for a wide range of scanners and soundcards. And I
like the idea to use it for more than normal things :-) 

....but up to now it's not much more than an idea!

martin