The previous post saw me grasping at straws, trying desperately to glean some inkling of insight into what's creating all the crazy interference-filled noisey Digital grunge we all know and love.
As with the Cluster critique, I'm now going to try to go through the various things I think could be improved or at least revised somewhat in future versions. Again, I mean no disrespect and I have nothing but love for the wonderful magicians at Teenage Engineering who have devised this clever device -- I just want to probe around and see if perhaps there are some ways to improve the current state of things.
(I promise some of these posts will be effusive with praise; actually they all should be, but I'm taking the good aspects for granted and focusing on what I think the biggest problems are -- especially in terms of UI/interface -- simply because that seems like the more useful topic to discuss: since TE are still actively developing the software, it's not too late to change the course of some of these things. At least, this is the hope.)
And so we begin our descent into the depths of Digital.
As with Cluster, I think the majority of my grievances (or, at least annoyances... or maybe even just slight irritations) concerning Digital stem from the graphical interface.
My main complaint in this case is that the graphics are mostly useless: super obfuscate-y, not functional at all. The particles and distance/stick constraints are fun and neat, but they do a terrible job of communicating to the user, being both far too abstract and also too vague.
Similar to Cluster, and unlike some of the wonderful revelations in the OP-1 -- Random LFO, Dr. Wave, Spring, String, which all communicate with the user by displaying a direct and beautiful metaphor of the sound-generating process -- with Digital there is no metaphor or attempt to communicate the "meaning" of the parameters.
While Cluster was visually boring and bland, you could at least see immediately what the current settings were; Digital in contrast seems to revel in hiding the current state of the synth.
As with Cluster, the animation seems to be more or less eye-candy: the particles are pushed around by distance constraints, parameter movements resulting in particle movements either directly or indirectly (by altering the length of the sticks connecting the particles). The particles dance and jostle and shove each other, but this movement isn't reflected in the sound: the position of the particles doesn't actually correspond in any real way to the sound produced, the visual simulation is one-way and doesn't feed back into the sound generation at all.
The result is a UI where multiple different visual states represent the exact same internal state; this seems like a bad decision. This vague indirect coupling between internal synth state and visual particle positions renders the actual state of the synth unknowable based on the graphics alone.
Additionally, half of the parameters (Green and White) jump discretely as their hidden values cross a hidden threshold; the result is that you never know how much you have to turn an encoder to get the parameter to jump to the next value. It's too bad, because live tweaking octave up/down would sound really good, were it not for the currently inevitable sloppy timing caused by a lack of solid meaningful visual feedback.
Green in particular seems like an awkward parameter, because of the "mapping" between encoder movement and internal value (I'm not sure what the correct term for this is): the user needs to turn the Green encoder many times to effect a single change in synth parameter. Internally there is hidden state: turning Green moves a hidden continuous value up/down, and when this hidden state crosses a hidden threshold, the result is a jump up or down an octave. But since both the current non-quantized state and the quantization thresholds are completely hidden from the user, it's impossible predict what will happen when the knob is turned. This is very frustrating and feels like Digital is actively fighting the user by making things as difficult as possible.
Having no clue as to what is really happening behind the scenes in Digital (as should have been abundantly clear by my wild flailings in the previous post), I can't really suggest a useful visual metaphor for this synth. I'm sure however that there exist many visual treatments which could do a much better job of communicating and expressing the important characteristics of the synth to the user than the current "random jumble of shifting nodes".
I would really like something which visually conveys the "meaning" of each parameter, in addition to clearly displaying their current value. Other synth and effects in OP-1 use this sort of "semantically rich" visual metaphor, it's a shame that it's not consistent; Digital's graphics are definitely novel, but sadly neither helpful nor useful.
Anyway, this concludes our look at Digital. Please stop by the OP-1 forums for feedback or discussion on this post! http://ohpeewon.com/discussion/228/op-101-digital
