The Hartmann Neuron was an

electronic musical instrument An electronic musical instrument or electrophone is a musical instrument that produces sound using electronic circuitry. Such an instrument sounds by outputting an electrical, electronic or digital audio signal that ultimately is plugged into ...

designed and built by industry designer Axel Hartmann of the German company

Hartmann Music Prosoniq Products Software was a German software developer of audio and music tools, mostly known for their sonicWORX, OrangeVocoder, TimeFactory and Hartmann Neuron synthesizer products. It also licensed proprietary technologies in the aud ...

in the years 2001–2005. The Neuron synthesizer used an

Artificial Neural Network Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...

to create a digital computer model from sampled sounds, implementing a new synthesis technology which was developed by

Stephan Bernsee Stephan Bernsee (born 1971) is a digital signal processing applications developer from Germany. Background Bernsee is the founder of the audio software company Prosoniq and the principal developer of the sound synthesis technology used in the H ...

Prosoniq Prosoniq Products Software was a German software developer of audio and music tools, mostly known for their sonicWORX, OrangeVocoder, TimeFactory and Hartmann Neuron synthesizer products. It also licensed proprietary technologies in the audi ...

. This computer model could then be used to resynthesize a new sound, giving the player control over "musical" aspects such as instrument body size, material and other acoustic properties. This parametric approach is very different from the more mathematical approaches of other synthesizers. The Hartmann Neuron VS, a Mac/Windows compatible

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software version of the instrument, was released in 2005.

Critique

Even though the instrument was awarded numerous prizes for innovation it was difficult to operate due to its limited display capabilities, which made adjusting the tonal qualities of a sound a tedious trial and error process. Given the very high price of the instrument (around 5000 USD) many people felt that manipulating a wireframe model of a sound only by ear did not allow for the amount of control necessary for such a complex operation. However, combined with a sample editor, the included Modelmaker software &

MIDI MIDI (; Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and re ...

control via

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, this difficulty can be somewhat rectified, albeit without the aid of the

3D image Stereoscopy (also called stereoscopics, or stereo imaging) is a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by means of stereopsis for binocular vision. The word ''stereoscopy'' derives . Any stereoscopic image is ...

of the model. Hartmann Music had to fight a couple of technical problems which were never remedied before the company finally filed for

insolvency In accounting, insolvency is the state of being unable to pay the debts, by a person or company ( debtor), at maturity; those in a state of insolvency are said to be ''insolvent''. There are two forms: cash-flow insolvency and balance-sheet i ...

, after a dispute with their distributor, in 2005. Although Hartmann Music went out of business, the Neuron synthesizer is still a sought after, hard-to-find instrument with unique sound. It is still being used today, mainly in the production of film music, for example by artists like Hans Zimmer and electronic musicians such as BT.

Technology

The Neuron synthesizer's hardware was based around a standard PC mainboard running an early version of the

Gentoo Linux Gentoo Linux (pronounced ) is a Linux distribution built using the Portage package management system. Unlike a binary software distribution, the source code is compiled locally according to the user's preferences and is often optimized for the ...

operating system. A custom application ran the sound synthesis algorithm, and the instrument used custom front panel displays and a custom sound card. The front panel and the casing of the synthesizer were designed by Axel Hartmann. It featured 3 orange stick controllers which allowed simultaneous manipulation of 2 assignable parameters (X/Y direction). There were 2 oscillators per

voice The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound production in ...

(called "Resynators") which were split in two parameter groupings: "Scape" would refer to the generation properties of a sound (such as the excitation source in a real instrument), "Sphere" would contain all parameters referring to the properties of the resonating "instrument" body. The two Resynators could be combined and put through a "Blender", which allowed different

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to be applied in the combination. The Neuron synthesizer also had an effects unit with EQ,

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modulation In electronics and telecommunications, modulation is the process of varying one or more properties of a periodic waveform, called the ''carrier signal'', with a separate signal called the ''modulation signal'' that typically contains informatio ...

, distortion, ring modulation,

reverb Reverberation (also known as reverb), in acoustics, is a persistence of sound, after a sound is produced. Reverberation is created when a sound or signal is reflected causing numerous reflections to build up and then decay as the sound is abso ...

and spectral warping effects, a

digital filter In signal processing, a digital filter is a system that performs mathematical operations on a sampled, discrete-time signal to reduce or enhance certain aspects of that signal. This is in contrast to the other major type of electronic filter, t ...

with variable cutoff frequency,

resonance Resonance describes the phenomenon of increased amplitude that occurs when the frequency of an applied periodic force (or a Fourier component of it) is equal or close to a natural frequency of the system on which it acts. When an oscillatin ...

and selectable characteristics, and assignable control wheels.

Construction

Internally, the motherboard is a Shuttle MV25(N) Socket 370,

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chipset with an Intel Celeron

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...

, heatsink & fan. The motherboard can accept up to 2x 512MB of non- ECC

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SDRAM Synchronous dynamic random-access memory (synchronous dynamic RAM or SDRAM) is any DRAM where the operation of its external pin interface is coordinated by an externally supplied clock signal. DRAM integrated circuits (ICs) produced from the ...

, although the system comes with 256MB as standard. The hard disk is a PC standard 20GB IDE unit. The audio & data

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i/o board is a custom Hartmann design & on-ribbon includes; MIDI,

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad v ...

& the first 5.1 surround sound hardware to be incorporated into a hardware synthesiser. The

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is a non-

ATX ATX (Advanced Technology eXtended) is a motherboard and power supply configuration specification developed by Intel in 1995 to improve on previous de facto standards like the AT design. It was the first major change in desktop computer enclo ...

design, although the exhaust fan is a standard PC part. The exhaust fan, however, is noisy in operation and may not be acceptable in the confines of a

soundproofed Jani Kervinen is a Finnish electronic music producer, specialized mainly in the trance music, trance subgenre. He has released music under such aliases as Mystery Islands, Kaste (with Mika Savela), Dyyni (with Mika Savela), K-De (with Kai Harmaala ...

mixing room. Externally, the casing is extremely solid, heavy-duty aluminium chassis with a wooden end panel. The one drawback are the four delicate plastic joysticks. However, these can be removed for transport.

Prominent musicians

Peter Gabriel Peter Brian Gabriel (born 13 February 1950) is an English musician, singer, songwriter, record producer, and activist. He rose to fame as the original lead singer of the progressive rock band Genesis. After leaving Genesis in 1975, he launched ...

* Hans Zimmer * Michael Cretu *

Brian Transeau Brian Wayne Transeau (born October 4, 1971), known by his initials as BT, is an American musician, DJ, singer, songwriter, composer and audio engineer. An artist in the electronic music genre, he is credited as a pioneer of the trance and intell ...

* Life In Balance (Steven Sciulli) *

Manfred Mann Manfred Mann were an English rock band, formed in London and active between 1962 and 1969. The group were named after their keyboardist Manfred Mann, who later led the successful 1970s group Manfred Mann's Earth Band. The band had two differen ...

Robert Scott Thompson Robert Scott Thompson (born 1959, California) is a composer of ambient, instrumental and electroacoustic music. He earned the B.Mus. degree from the University of Oregon and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, San Diego. H ...

* Luis Resto

Critique

Technology

Construction

Prominent musicians

References

Further reading

External links