Light Synthesisers

A description of what a lightsynth is, from an interview with Yak by James Hague in 1995:-

James:
What's the story behind your long series of "light synthesizer" programs?

Yak:
That's a long and strange story and it's not over yet.

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far away, or at least in Basingstoke, the fourteen-year-old proto-Yak got invited to a party where he had his first taste of alcohol. Not knowing any better, he went on drinking the stuff all night and ended up having a pretty bad time involving a lot of throwing up and feeling rotten.

On the way, however, he met a really nice girl who he totally failed to get off with and also saw these really primitive disco lights that the DJ had. Proto-Yak thought to himself, in a drunken, twisted kind of a way, that there had to be a better way of interpreting music visually than that.

This was before I had even seen a computer, but a lot of listening to Pink Floyd and watching the patterns on the backs of my eyelids in a darkened room kinda made me think there would be a better way, and somehow that it would involve large projection screens.

The first lightsynth was finally created after a particularly enlightening trip to Peru, hanging out in the Andes with lots of llamas and returning home inspired.

We've been through a lot of incarnations since then, most recently with the "Virtual Light Machine" for the Jag CD-ROM. And it's not over yet. I am about to get involved with some hardware** that could do a lightsynth so amazing that just owning the software could get you in trouble with the DEA!

[PVB says]
 ** That hardware was the Nuon DVD system.

The next iteration of lightsynth was developed as part of the Unity Project on the Nintendo Gamecube, but never completed.

Now Llamasoft have just completed the latest lightsynth built into the Xbox 360, called Neon.