At first glance, this may look like a retro styled monome, but it is actually quite different. Merging a Project64 key pad and a Voice Shield for Arduino, [Spikenzie] has made a sound effects box. Each button triggers a unique sound that is stored in the Voice Shield. Of coarse, it will be like a game of memory trying to remember what sound is where. You can see a demo video here.
The fine folks at Midnight Research Labs have put together a new toy for you to play with. It’s a Python script that makes your WiFi hardware behave more like a theremin. Based on the pyaudio library it monitors the signal strength of the AP you’re connected to and changes the tone accordingly. There’s a sample embedded above (direct link). If you have a second interface, you can use it to modulate the volume. It’s an interesting trick, but they say that there’s enough latency that it would be hard to play actual music with it.
[Matt] was looking into some software that allows him to use his audio card as a means to control analog audio devices. After seeing how it worked, he got an idea to try to do the opposite. He is sending a signal into his audio input, and piping it to a pice of MIDI software. The input he has chose is a foot switch. To create the signal, he simply needed to supply voltage while the switch was depressed. You can see above that he used a battery and a simple contact switch to send the signal. He then piped it to a virtual MIDI port using Maple Virtual MIDI Cable. Unfortunately, this isn’t suitable for knobs, but that may be next on his list.
Now that the iphone-dev team has unlocked the iPhone 3G they’re moving onto jailbreaking the iPod Touch 2G. While they have a fully working jailbreak, it’s not yet in a user friendly format. [MuscleNerd] did a live video demo this afternoon to show what progress they had made. It starts with him showing the iPod on but not booting. He’s already patched the kernel, but it’s failing the signature check in iboot. He then uses the team’s recoverytool to exploit a hole in iboot and patch out the signature check. The ipod then boots normally and he shows non-App Store software like Mobile Terminal, Cydia, and an NES Emulator (which makes use of the iPod’s internal speaker).
The redsn0w jailbreak works, but it has to be applied via tether every time the iPod boots. The team won’t release anything until they’ve found a way around this problem. For more insight into the boot process, check out our coverage of their Hacking the iPhone talk at 25C3.
[vimeo 720761]
[Giles Bowkett] has been working on a music library for Ruby called Archaeopteryx. He describes it as a “Ruby MIDI DJing/live-coding thing“. In the video above, He’s using it to generate and then morph rhythms. The Ruby code is directly controlling the step sequencer in Reason. It’s an interesting approach to music development. The video above gives a full intro to the probability approach to generation. To really get a feel for the library, we suggest you watch his presentation from RubyFringe. It shows him playing music by editing a live block of code. Check out his Vimeo feed for many more demo videos.
[via CDM]
[nepheron] shows us how he hacked his walkie talkie to broadcast music. While using this to broadcast music is possibly illegal, it could be used to make actual upgrades to your system as well. He has replaced the microphone input with a headphone cable and extended the antenna. It is only mono, and he states it will only run for a minute before shutting off, so there is definitely room for improvement.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9S9SZswOC0]
If you like the sound of the theramin, you may enjoy the Ondestrak. Based loosely off of the Ondes Martnot, the Ondestrak works by changing the pitch of a continuous note. [Devin_mccutchen] built his using an old gametrak controller. The controller looks pretty cool. We hadn’t seen that one before. Check out a more musical performance after the break.
