I poked around a bunch looking for non-MacMini solutions for our audio system and found very little. RaspberryPi seems to be the best option and capable of supporting multi-channel audio, though audio on RaspPi seems to be troublesome and problematic at best. That said, this guy got a RaspPi working as a DSP processor…
In response to Graham’s earlier post: it should be simple to build a resonant filter patch in PD. so yay for that. Getting it to work on RaspPi should be do-able, but maybe not as simple as plug and play. So we plug and pray…
Satellite CCRMA should have all the relevant audio bits for RaspPi wrapped up in one package: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~eberdahl/Satellite/
For multi-channel audio output we need a multi-channel interface:
Peter Elsea recommends the Gigaport HD+ ($185).
Here’s a list of supported audio interfaces for running PD on a RaspberryPi
The GigaportHD+ looks like the only good option.
And then we need 6-8 powered speakers or amp+speaker combinations…
could be that we do an audio channel for each of the main plankton sculptures…
It we want to keep costs down and functionality simple we could use a cheaper two-channel interface, but then we only have two channels and a less versatile system.
And of course, we need to decide if we’re going with resonant filters or nice-nasty sound files to illustrate (auralate?) the state of the system, balanced to imbalances. I kinda like the idea of having a channel per plankton either way…