Weather

[brytta.leofa]

Is it going to be worth the trouble to build this thing for a noise / music application?

Doesn't it seem like a great idea to put chaos circuitry in instruments for noise bands?

You might be disappointed; it's not designed to, for instance, even necessarily generate a response in the audible bands.  I'd suggest playing with it in a simulator...there's a Java one at the Caltech link I posted, or you could put it in SPICE.

If the trajectory (one voltage versus another) was perfectly circular, you'd expect to get a sine wave by picking off one of the axes.  Since this circuit's trajectories are typically elliptical-ish, I suppose you'd get something tending more towards a square or a sawtooth wave.  Some of the effects that are dramatic in a plot (swooping from one orbit to another, slight variations between trajectories) would probably have little audible affect.  I think the best-case scenario would be that you'd get a slightly distorted hum on a single note.

If you have access to tools like Matlab and SPICE, I'd suggest working up a simulation of the circuit and actually generating some sound files before you go to build anything.

[lurkus ignoramus]

I see... Will I be able to get audio out of the simulator?

If you do not have access to an oscilloscope, you can use the voltage across C1 or C2 as the input to a high input impedance audio amplifier (with the component values shown the frequency of the oscillations is in the audio range). It turns out that the ear is very sensitive to the development of a weak subharmonic. The subharmonic becomes the fundamental an octave below the original tone, and the ear hears the note drop an octave even when the intensity of the new fundamental is very weak. The first two or three transitions in the subharmonic cascade route to chaos, and the onset of chaos (noise!) are very audible.

That is what led me to believe it could be interesting to incorporate into an instrument...

Is the audio less satisfying than the written description makes it sound?  Have you ever tried producing audio with one?

[brytta.leofa]

Guess I should read my own links, shouldn't I?  Nope, I haven't tried it.