I found an old box of cassettes with a couple of gems in it. One actually has my final project from an electronic music composition class I took in 1979. I was poking my nose into dusty corners in the basement of the music building at the University of Arizona, and found a rack of wire wrapped circuit boards with a terminal, a couple of 8" floppy drives, and an 88 key keyboard attached! I started asking around, and learned that it was one of the 5 prototypes of the Micor Coupland digital synthesizer. It had been left by a professor who had retired, and no one knew anything about it. So being me, I asked if I could play around with it. They made me take the 400 level class (as a sophomore) to get access to it, and I happily obliged, and got a couple of friends to help me haul it out of the basement and set it up in the 8-track studio. Now keep in mind that in 1979 no one had even considered a digital synthesizer, and you could count the polyphonic synths in the WORLD on one hand. Here was a FULLY (88-note) polyphonic DIGITAL synth! So I set about putting it all back together, started sticking floppies in until I found one that actually booted up, and I was off and running.
It was based on the TI-9900 microprocessor. Sounds were created by entering an equation that gave voltage as a function of time. It had 2 oscillators, the main oscillator and a modulation oscillator, and an ADSR that controlled the amplitude. The keyboard was the only "performance" control - all other real-time changes to the sound had to be commanded on the terminal. I learned to type with one hand while playing with the other.
Anyway, this is what came out of a fun-filled semester playing with this beast. Musically, I don't think it is that great (I was very young). I am putting it up here strictly for its historical significance; to showcase what this synth could have become if Micor hadn't pulled the funding.
There is a little bit of info on it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupland_D ... ynthesizer - but the story I heard (from a girl I was dating, who's father was a friend of Rick Coupland) was that Rick was so mad when Micor pulled the funding that he destroyed all of the documentation, and wouldn't even talk about the project to anyone after that. This MAY be the only surviving recording of this magnificent instrument.
Here is a picture I found of the later, performance-enabled prototype
And here is what it sounded like:
http://soundcloud.com/ish-kabbible/mico ... st-digital
