Chameleon

The Sound-Art Chameleon was a DSP development platform housed in a 1U 19" rack format. It allowed developers to quickly create synthesisers and share their work in the community.

The Chameleon has a motorola coldfire for it's main CPU and a 56000 based DSP for the audio processing engine. It has a stereo input and stereo output as well as MIDI in and out. Additionally there is a serial cable to allow developers to develop and debug their applications.

The software Development kit (SDK) was developed by Sound-Art and was available to download from their site. This was a completely integrated development environment (IDE) which allowed coding in C, C++ and DSP assembler to happen all in the same window, a simple "compile and upload" button made for rapid development on the hardware.

Each application was referred to as a 'skin', there are 13 skins available

Entity, an open source virtual analogue synth 6 note polysynth with a filter modelled on the MS20 filter

SouthPole, an open source filter band SP delay effect application

Monowave II, an open source monosynth based on the Monowave with extra features

Phoenix, a polyphonic version of the Monowave II

Infiltrator, a powerful vocoder

Fahrenheit, a dance module, consisting of two TB303 clones, a TR808 and TR909 clone along with effects and mixer.

Australis, a powerful fully features VA polysynth.

Amp-o-matic, a guitar module allowing emulation of valve amplifiers, speaker cabs and effects

Chromasonic, a flexible multi-fx system

FX designer, a creative delay based effect unit

Roomverb M1, a high quality reverb unit

Face-1, a phase distortion synthesiser

Looper, a looper machine.

A second Chameleon was developed (in prototype form) with USB, SD card, graphic display and additional inputs and outputs but poor uptake of the concept eventually forced the closure of Sound-Art. Since their closure Paul Maddox has hosted their website on his synth.net server (http://chameleon.synth.net/english/skins/entity/).