Datatonism

Datatonism is a digital emulation of the Dataton System 3000 – a Swedish electronic music synthesizer. Designed by Björn Sandlund in the 1970s, the system consists of brick-shaped modules that connect to each other sideways like Legos. As final project for the course DT2213 Musical Communication and Music Technology given at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, we have re-created Sandlunds system in a digital context. The name and main patch is derived from Automatonism, a modular synth system created for Pure Data.

The system consists of 12 modules – 3 source modules, 5 manipulating modules, and 4 editing modules.

Requirements / Start-up guide

Requirements
Datatonism is developed on Pure Data. External libraries include moonlib.

Start-up

• To use Datatonism, you simply download the repository and open the patch called main.pd.
• If you do not have the moonlib library, this needs to be installed:
  • Open Pd
  • Click Help --> Find externals
  • Search for moonlib and click on the result (if multiple results, click the latest updated one)
  • Sometimes, you'll have to manually add the path. You can do this by clicking File --> Preferences --> Path --> 'New', and find the moonlib folder
• Modules can be found through the MODULES(esc) button or by pressing esc.
• Most modules have 6 inlets and 6 outlets – 2 for the A/B stereo bus and 4 channels. Connections are generally made between the same types, however it is also possible to mix and match.
• The general order of inlets/outlets are A, B, ch1, ch2, ch3, ch4.
• [dac~] is not built in to the mixers and need to be created and connected by yourself.

Help-files / Documentation

Help-files for the modules are still a work in process. However, there is documentation covering the inlets/outlets, parameters, and functions of each module, and also a bit about its physical counterpart for the curious.

Known issues

• Opening module-patches and changing knob parameters can result in the knobs disappearing/become bigger.
• Knobs are not editable in Windows Pd 64-bit version due to constraints from moonlib.
• When initially creating modules you might get an error message: "statesave/x-yyy-zzz-ss.txt: can't open / read failed". This is due to the state saving mechanism having to create a file for each new instance of the module and is not a problem.

Team-members

Dimitrios Aatos Ellinas    ellinas@kth.se
Zezhe Huang       zezhe@kth.se
Kristin Johansson Evegård evegard@kth.se
Carl Leandersson      carllea@kth.se
Martin Linder Nilsson    hmni@kth.se
Karolina Shi        karshi@kth.se
Yan Yu           yan8@kth.se