About Thomas Hammer

I'm a Master of Science in Computers,
graduated in 1996 from NTNU.
I'm working for Systems In Motion as
Research & Development Manager.

On my spare time I often create music,
sounds and sound&music-related software.
You can read more about my software
and sounds at the HammerSound pages.

You can reach me by email to thammer@pvv.org

In '93/'94 I made a program that transferred disk-images for my Ensoniq EPS sampler to and from the PC, this program was used to exchange sounds with other Ensoniq users on the web. There are still some people around the world who uses this program (including me, of course). The most challenging part of the project was a lot of low level IRQ programming to controll the Floppy controller, as the format of the disk was definetly not DOS.

In '95 I did a box-and-arrow (boxes do processing, arrows transmit data) program called 'SIGMA'. With a few basic building blocks (i.e. boxes, like a mathematical function evaluator, wave file reader & writer, envelope generator) I was able to implement several basic synthesis techniques, like FM, AM, Additive synthesis, Waveshaping - never got around to filtering. Nowadays 'everybody' is doing these sort of programs, I'm sure there must be at least 10-20 such programs for the PC and a lot for NEXT/UNIX too.

In '95/'96, as a part of my post-graduate thesis, I created a 3D sound system, called 'SimSound' using a PC with 3 soundcards, varying volume, pan, reverb and filtering to simulate 3D sound for 1-4 people standing in the middle of a circle with 6 speakers. SimSound got it's object coordinates via ethernet
(udp/ip) from a SGI Onyx who did all the graphics.

In spring '97, I made a small program called 'Pax' that convert Joystick x and y data to midi. Great for manipulating the AWE NRPN Midi parameters like Filter Cutoff and Resonance.

Last summer ('97) I made a program called 'The Source' whose purpose was to see if I could create a 'MIDI + Joystick INPUT controls a simple arpeggiator who controls a simple synthesis engine (2-op FM & PWM) which generates real-time output'. It worked quite ok if you accept a 200ms delay (on a Pentium 133), which of course makes it non-realtime - but at least the audio output was continious.

Using my experience & code from the SimSound project, It took me about 1 day to make sf2load, a program that assists users of the AWE soundcard in the use of SoundFonts, sf2load is available from HammerSound.