I think there’s something to your feedback, one-to-many, and misinterpretation criteria. I spent part of this afternoon circuit-bending my Big Muff, which got me thinking about an old job I had as a synthesizer tech in Austin.
Part of what I enjoy about analog synths and guitar pedals is their immediacy, their sensitivity. I often work on them while they’re plugged into an amplifier, so I can hear the effects of what I’m doing in real time. Press on a transistor or capacitor in the right part of a circuit, and the sound warps and wraps around its new embodied reality. Of course, one can constrain a transistor to behave as a digital switch. I suspect a transistor is still a sensor even if its response is constrained to that limit. Positive feedback on a NOT gate makes for a cheap and ready square-wave generator, and is pretty tolerant to perturbation. There was one time when a client brought in a Kurzweil digital piano. I opened it to find one big chip. The design was clearly oriented toward control. If the circuit was set for the piano to make trumpet sounds, well, that’s the sound it was going to make. Press on the chip and you’d be more likely to break something before pressure became an interesting control signal. The Kurzweil is designed so that the components are insensitive to perturbation and shielded from the world. I’m not sure how I would classify its keys. Are they actuators or sensors? A sensorimotor interface? What about bumper cars?
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