Infinitone

[Gandalfe]

It looks like a saxophone but plays 512 notes — many you’ve never heard before
How a jazz musician created the Infinitone to challenge Western musical ideas.
By Tony Rehagen

"The Infinitone, an elongated pyramid of brass, resembles a futuristic soprano saxophone, with the usual mouthpiece, reed, and ligature. But while a sax’s keys attach to valves that open and shut, the Infinitone has five motorized slides that give it the flexibility of a trombone or guitar. The horn plugs into an iPad, which controls the slides. Rather than playing the instrument directly, the player touches the screen to play a colorful spectrum of 512 notes — 256 per octave, instead of the usual black-and-white 12."

Woodwind Forum | "The Infinitone, an elongated pyramid of brass, resembles a futuristic soprano saxophone, with the usual mouthpiece, reed, and ligature | Facebook

"The Infinitone, an elongated pyramid of brass, resembles a futuristic soprano saxophone, with the usual mouthpiece, reed, and ligature. But while a sax’s keys attach to valves that open and shut,...

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[pete]

I saw the article the other day and did a bit of listening. There were slide saxophones that could do essentially the same thing, of course.

I don't particularly care for quarter tones and such, so this is a "not for me." I do think it's cool and the guy's won awards for building it. The tech might be something I look more into.

 

[Helen]

Here's my take on this: Some of my horns are close to 100 years old. My oldest is from 1886. They all still work and I use them--pre-COVID I did at least--either at rehearsals, performances, while teaching lessons, or for educational presentations. In 100 years from now people will ask: What's an iPad?

Tech changes. 5" floppy discs. Remember those? Zip discs. Anyone remember using those? Flash drives will soon be a thing of the past as well.

Any instrument that requires tech to play will not last past a certain # of software or hardware updates.

As Pete said, a vintage slide sax--or even the new ones made by J'elle Stainer--will accomplish the same thing. The advantage is, they don't require anti-virus software.

 

[saxhound]

Slight thread hijack. I went from 5.25" disks to 3.5" disks (with a brief encounter with an 8" Bernoulli box) to 100 MB zip drives to 250 MB zip drives to CD / DVD drives to flash and SSD hard drives. What's next? Not sure, but it will inevitably be smaller, cheaper and larger capacity. Maybe a chip implanted in your brain.

On a related note, I heard a good explanation for CRS (can't remember stuff) syndrome. Your brain is basically like a late 1980's hard drive. It spins and spins and eventually finds the index location of the data you are seeking, assuming it hasn't been erased. So 10 minutes (or 10 hours) later it pops up and spews out of your mouth.

 

[pete]

I think some flash drives are too small. I've got a few that are probably less than 1/2" long. They're hard to plug into a USB port and extremely easy to lose. However, I've also got a couple flash drives that are too wide to use in a USB port because I have something else plugged into the USB port next to it, like, say, a keyboard.

While it's possible that there will be even smaller devices in the future, it's now more about cramming as much storage into one of those flash drives. You can even get a flash-drive-sized case and put an NVMe drive with 8tb of storage space in it.

 

[pete]

Car talk moved to https://woodwindforum.com/forum/ind...-talk-about-cars-theyve-loved-or-hated.26313/