The Cap’n and one of his friends are building a control voltage… uh, controller… called The Spider out of a couple of arduinos and lots of elbow and brain grease. I might have mentioned it before, but I think the machining of the box is near-done:

I’m no expert, but I here’s a stab at an explanation:

Most electronic music equipment has a PCM interface — pulse controlled modulation — which means that you can send little waves of electricity to change settings for you. It’s aesthetically pleasing if these pulses are, themselves, timed to or move with the music.

For example, when you DJ a party and want to lower volume levels it often sounds better to twist the knob in discrete jumps on bar boundaries rather than smoothly turning the knob the same total amount over the same total period. The Spider does something like that: generates pulses to the beat, and allows you to tweak and route said pulses.

It’s the kind of project which makes me jelly: a good idea with a clear execution path that will be useful even if they only ever build one, which looks fun to work on, and might — might — gain a wider audience. It smells like a successful Kickstarter. Wikkid.