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

John Coppens jcoppens at usa.net
Mon Mar 31 19:28:19 BST 2003


Hi Martin

Just an idea: Scanners are quite slow, and would provide little
interactivity. Wouldn't it be more usefull to use a web-cam (or better)
for this? Maybe a cheap webcam might not provide enough resolution (320
pix horizontally or so) but a medium quality camera can give 640, op to
1600 or more pixels/line - at 6 octaves, that's 100 pixels/octave or more!

If you want the 'touch effect' of the glass, use a glass pane, with
backlighting and the camera on the other side.

This way you can have up to 50 (60) images/second and a much faster
reaction speed for your musical instrument. 

Just a thought...

John

On Sun, 30 Mar 2003 22:14:07 +0200
Martin Langer <martin-langer at gmx.de> wrote:

> 
> Hi,
> 
> I've just had an idea about a crazy scanner frontend:
> 
> 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. 
> 
> I'm more involved into the ALSA side of this problem and absolutely new
> to sane development. So my question:
> 
> 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 developer information available? I've just had a look to some
> command line frontends, but they don't touch this point (ok, it's
> possible that I'm blind!). But my impression was: they only handle
> complete scans, which I don't want to use. Or is there a general problem
> in the control of scanning devices, if I have this goal ..... because
> they were not build for this use.
> 
> Is there a counterpart to "sane_get_parameters()" for setting those
> parameters, like lines and pixels? 
> 
> Anybody out there, who can give me some hints or who can say: "Forget
> It!"
> 
> 
> thanks,
> martin
> 
> 
> 
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