Buchla Lightning
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Buchla Lightning is the second in a series of MIDI controllers developed by Don Buchla. It consists of two independent hand-held electronic wands and a box unit that enable a player to initiate sounds and to manipulate those sounds spatially.
Description
The basic concept behind Buchla Lightning (1, 2 and 3) is that you program the unit to assign certain MIDI events/messages to wand gestures. These MIDI messages become sounds as determined by the user. You perform these gestures while holding one wand in each hand. There is a separate box/unit that picks up the gestures you make with the wands and then the sound is produced.
In technical terms. The two wands emit infrared light that is detected by optics. The optics (photo-sensors) "see" the wands to determine two-dimensional location and whether the button on the wand is depressed. By analyzing location information in real-time, the Lightning can determine acceleration and direction changes and turn these gestures into MIDI notes with velocity sensitivity.
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This entry incorporates text from “Buchla Lightning” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.