Once in a while, we see a project that makes us want to stop whatever we’re doing and build our own version of it. This time, it’s Modulum, a pendulum-based MIDI controller. It’s exactly what it sounds like. The swinging pendulum acts as a low-frequency oscillator. In the demo video configuration, you can hear it add a watery, dreamlike quality, sort of like a lap steel guitar on LSD.
The pendulum’s motion is detected by four pieces of stretchy, conductive cord. These are wired to an Arduino Nano in a voltage divider fashion. [Evan and Kirk] used the Maxuino library to determine x and y mapping of possible pendular positions as well as perform the necessary MIDI processing. Get your groove on after the break, and check out some of the many other fantastic MIDI controllers we’ve had the pleasure of covering.
Real cat music, but still cool IO
Well said.
The position tracking is kind of neat – the music mod’s, yeah no.
You can use either axis to control any MIDI parameter – also, this was made the night before it was due and we didn’t have time to write a song, so Kirk was doing 100% improv. I think this was something like the second take.
its a whammy bar in 2 dimensions!
Panning an output would be cool
I built this, happy to answer any questions!
any other modulation other than pitchbend would have been nicer.
Yeah no kidding, X for cutoff freq and Y for resonance would actually be listenable
should send it to the channel that controls something like detune or resonance or envelope control on a synth…thay would be cool…you could make it sound like a leslie…
The HAD creed – don’t read the article, watch the first 30 seconds of video, post negative comment. Very nice build, many potentially interesting applications here for creative musicians.
Yeah, we only put a few of these up each day. They’re picked not so people will read the hackaday article and stop there… There’s gold in these projects as long as people click through and dig deeper!
The secondary HaD creed: Pick on other people’s comments and think that somehow makes you better (rather than what it really does.)
In fact most comment are spot on, the concept and build is interesting, the video demo is painful to listen to, it’s a simple truth.
Mind you I recently watched a number of videos selling VR technology to the public and half of them used sawtooth based music as intro and through it. So I guess it’s all relative.
Seismometer!
Connect it to the newsreader’s voice output and you have a nice sense of drama during earthquakes :)
I give 2- for the music part as I got real urge to shoot my self to make it stop :-)
Innovation and implementation 10+