Fair point about the position of the synth. OK - that's separate. And so are the two antenna. The pitch is a 2 metre tall stick. (I love the theremin in the video on youTube of Lydia Kavina - that has an outrageously tall pitch antenna.) The volume is an upside-down L. Each has a tuning button and LED, like on the TVox volume control. Press the button, put you hand where max volume will be, light goes on, done. So much neater than a knob.
I suspect you are right about the Doepfer Theremin CV source. I have written to them enquiring. I was a bit surprised that a description of the characteristics of the antenna was not provided on the site. It is otherwise very detailed in its descriptions of modules.
Also I don't see a module that heterodynes two high frequency signals to create the characteristic almost but not exactly a sine wave that would be a requirement for me. But for the sake of a gedankenexperiment we can assume that we have a good theremin oscillator module, and two usable antenna with CV outputs. That, and a voltage controlled amplifier makes a good theremin.
I get what a modular synth is. It's a set of building blocks for making electronic instruments. Join them up one way, and you've got a theremin. Join them up another and you've got a trautonium. (Looks like they've done a really good job on creating the components for a trautonium, incidentally. Shame they didn't get quite so excited about the theremin. Maybe when I eventually meet the guy from theremin.co.uk I shall have to talk to him about eurorack mounted theremin modules and see if he gets excited.) Join them up a third way and you've got an instrument no-one ever imagined before.
Incidentally, it's a bit mad the way they've done it though - fixing the positions of the components and making you cover them in spaghetti. As a kid I had a kit of digital components, and gates, or gates, inverters etc, each encased in a little box. You arranged them in the order you wanted, and clicked them together. Occasionally a bit of wire was required, but mostly just the click connectors sufficed - it was a lot tidier, and most importantly it looked like the circuit diagram - so what it was doing was immediately apparent just by looking at it. That is a better way of organising things.
One key feature is that other components can be added into any part of this circuit, not just at the output stage. In other words, the pitch, volume and timbre can be processed separately, which is something I can understand. It's a bit like being able to deal with hue, luminosity and saturation in photoshop, except there's more to timbre than there is to saturation. The point is it separates a complicated signal into three simpler and more manageable parts.
I don't follow the very technical descriptions of many of the modules entirely, so instead I shall be considering what I would want to do at different stages, based on my understanding that analogue circuits can do some interesting maths, and that I can also gate things, so Boolean logic can also be applied. Then once I've figured out what I might want to do, I'll go and see if the corresponding modules exist.
