Replicating The World’s Oldest Stringed Instrument

August 21, 2025 by Tyler August 9 Comments

Posts on Hackaday sometimes trend a little bit retro, but rarely do we cover hacks that reach back into the Bronze Age. Still, when musician [Peter Pringle] put out a video detailing how he replicated an ancient Sumerian instrument, we couldn’t wait to dig in.

The instrument in question is the “Golden Lyre of Ur”, and it was buried at the Royal Cemetery of Ur with a passel of other grave goods (including a Silver Lyre) something around 4400 to 4500 years ago. For those not in the know, Ur was an early Sumerian city in the part of Mesopotamia became modern-day Iraq. A lyre is a type of plucked stringed instrument, similar to a harp.

That anything of the instrument remains after literal millennia buried under the Mesopotamian sand is thanks to the

This representation was unearthed in the same dig as the remains of the Golden Lyre and its silver sister.

extensive ornamentation on the original lyre– the gut strings and wooden body might have rotted away, but the precious stones and metals adorning the lyre preserved the outline of the instrument until it was excavated in 1922. Reconstruction was also greatly aided by contemporary mosaics and pottery showing similar lyres.

For particular interest are the tuning pegs, which required that artistic inspiration to recreate– the original archeological dig did not find any evidence of the tuning mechanism. [Peter] spends some time justifying his reconstruction, using both practical engineering concerns (the need for tension to get good sound) and the pictographic evidence. The wide “buzzing” bridge matches the pictographic evidence as well, and gives the lyre a distinct, almost otherworldly sound to Western ears. [Peter]’s reconstruction sounds good, though we have no way of knowing if it matches what you’d have heard in the royal halls of Ur all those dusty centuries ago. (Skip to 17:38 in the video below if you just want to hear it in action.)

The closest thing to this ancient, man-sized lyre we’ve seen on Hackaday before might be one of the various laser harp projects we’ve featured over the years. If you squint a little, you can see the distant echo of the Golden Lyre of Ur in at least some of them. We also can’t help but note that the buzzing bridge gives the Sumerian lyre a certain droning quality not entirely unlike a hurdy-gurdy, because we apparently can’t have a musical post without mentioning the hurdy-gurdy.

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Rediscovering Microsoft’s Oddball Music Generator From The 1990s

August 14, 2025 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

There has been a huge proliferation in AI music creation tools of late, and a corresponding uptick in the number of AI artists appearing on streaming services. Well before the modern neural network revolution, though, there was an earlier tool in this same vein. [harke] tells us all about Microsoft Music Producer 1.0, a forgotten relic from the 1990s.

The software wasn’t ever marketed openly. Instead, it was a part of Microsoft Visual InterDev, a web development package from 1997. It allowed the user to select a style, a personality, and a band to play the song, along with details like key, tempo, and the “shape” of the composition. It would then go ahead and algorithmically generate the music using MIDI instruments and in-built synthesized sounds.

As [harke] demonstrates, there are a huge amounts of genres to choose from. Pick one, and you’ll most likely find it sounds nothing like the contemporary genre it’s supposed to be recreating. The more gamey genres, though, like “Adventure” or “Chase” actually sound pretty okay. The moods are hilariously specific, too — you can have a “noble” song, or a “striving” or “serious” one. [harke] also demonstrates building a full song with the “7AM Illusion” preset, exporting the MIDI, and then adding her own instruments and vocals in a DAW to fill it out. The result is what you’d expect from a composition relying on the Microsoft GS Wavetable synth.

Microsoft might not have cornered the generative music market in the 1990s, but generative AI is making huge waves in the industry today.

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Building A Trash Can Reverb

August 11, 2025 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

These days, if you want a reverb effect, you just dial up whatever software plugin most appeals to you and turn the dials to taste. However, [Something Physical] specialises in… physical things… and thus built a reverb the old fashioned way. Using a trashcan, of course.

The concept is simple enough—the method of operation is exactly the same as any old plate reverb. Audio is played through a speaker connected to the plate (or trashcan), causing it to vibrate. The sound is then picked up at another point on the plate (or trashcan) with some kind of microphonic pickups, amplified, and there you have your reverb signal.

Given it’s built around a piece of street furniture, [Something Physical] has dubbed this the Street-Verb. It uses a class D amp to drive a speaker with a bolt stuck to it. The bolt is then put in contact with the trashcan itself to transfer the vibration. A pair of piezo elements are used as the pickups, run through a preamps built with a humble BC109C transistor. Since there are two pickups, the Street-Verb is effectively a stereo reverb unit, though the input is only mono. [Something Physical] set up the speaker driver and pickups to be easily movable, and was able to test the device with all kinds of street furniture, like gates and street signs, but the trashcan ‘verb setup is by far the most compelling.

We’ve featured other plate reverb builds before, too, albeit less garbage-themed. Video after the break.

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The Tape Speed Keyboard

August 4, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

For those who experienced any part of the 1960s, even if it’s just experiencing the music from that era here in the future, the sound of the Mellotron is immediately recognizable. The Moody Blues were famous for using the tape-based instrument, and the Beatles and David Bowie produced hits with it as well. It’s haunting sounds are still highly prized today, but the complexity, cost, and maintenance requirement for the tape loops and other moving parts can put many musicians off from owning one. But [Japhy Riddle] has built an instrument without these downsides called the Tape Speed Keyboard.

Unlike the Mellotron which used a tape loop for each of its keys, the Tape Speed Keyboard uses only a single cassette tape. As the name implies, it changes the pitch of the sound by modulating the speed of the single tape housed in its own tape deck. The keyboard itself started off life as a Casio MT-35 but since this is a completely analog instrument, it was rewired so each key is connected to a potentiometer whose output voltage is tuned to a specific tape speed. [Japhy] reports that this is similar to tuning an analog piano and the process can be equally temperamental.

With everything electronic working, [Japhy] turned to making this a more acceptable musical instrument. Predictably, turning the motor on and off for each key press came with a bit of delay, causing the sound to come out goofy and muddy. To solve this problem he changed the design to make the tape play continuously rather than start and stop for a key press, and then modified other keys to be on-off switches for sound output. Since cassette tapes have two sides, he can also play either of two sounds in this way.

With the final polish on, the Tape Speed Keyboard is able to produce completely unique compositions that separate it from even the venerable Mellotron. Be sure to check out the video linked below to hear its sound. There have been plenty of other musical projects based around tape decks as well, including this one inspired by the original Mellotron and this tape deck-based guitar effects pedal.

Thanks to [splashbun] for the tip!

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Fire Alarm Disco Party

August 4, 2025 by Ian Bos 34 Comments

What should your first instinct be when the room catches on fire? Maybe get out of the room, pull an alarm, and have a disco party? Not your first instinct? Well, this seemed pretty obvious to [Flying-Toast], who retrofitted an old fire alarm to activate a personal disco party.

After finding a fire alarm being sold on eBay, [Flying-Toast] couldn’t resist the urge to purchase one to use for his own purposes. He immediately gutted the life-saving internals to fill the shell with his own concoction of ESP goodness to be activated by the usual fire alarm mechanism. This sends a signal to the next elements of the party system.

Every part of the party system receives this activation signal, including the most important part, the party lights. Using a generic crystal disco ball and its own ESP, the party lights are more than sufficient to create the proper panic party. Of course, what is a party without music? With another ESP board and salvaged speakers, the proper atmosphere can be set right before the venue burns to the ground. The final touch is the additional hacked WIFI relays to turn off the lights in the room.

Priorities are important in emergencies, and that is exactly what [Flying-Toast] gave us with this project. Learning from this expertise is important, but how about learning from the near misses? For some risky decision making, be sure to check out the near nuclear war that was almost caused by a false alarm!

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Keyboard Hero: A Barebones Alternative To The Guitar Version

August 3, 2025 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

Guitar Hero was all the rage for a few years, before the entire world apparently got sick of it overnight. Some diehards still remember the charms of rhythm games, though. Among them you might count [Joseph Valenti] and [Daniel Rodriguez], who built a Keyboard Hero game for their ECE 4760 class at Cornell.

Keyboard Hero differs quite fundamentally from Guitar Hero in one major way. Rather than having the player tackle a preset series of “notes,” the buttons to press are instead procedurally generated by the game based on incoming audio input. It only works with simple single-instrument piano music, but it does indeed work. A Raspberry Pi Pico is charged with analyzing incoming audio and assigning the proper notes. Another Pi Pico generates the VGA video output with the game graphics, which is kept in sync with the audio pumped out from the first Pico so the user can play the notes in time with the music. Rather than a guitar controller, Keyboard Hero instead relies on five plastic buttons assembled on a piece of wood. It works.

It’s obviously not as refined as the game that inspired it, but the procedural generation of “notes” reminds us of old-school rhythm game Audiosurf. Video after the break.

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Digital Guitar Of The Future Has No Strings

August 1, 2025 by Tyler August 39 Comments

Electric guitars are great, but they’re just so 20th century. You’d think decades of musicians riffing on the instrument would mean there are no hacks left in the humble axe. You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. [Michael], for one, has taken it upon himself to reinvent the electric guitar for the digital era.

Gone are the strings, and the frets have vanished as well. The neck of this guitar is one long custom PCB, looking very sleek with black solder mask. Gold pads serve as touch sensors to give tone data over i2c (from unspecified touch sensing chips) to the Amtel Mega 32u4 at the heart of the build.

With no strings, strumming won’t work, so a laptop-style touchpad serves instead. That means every user interaction with this guitar is with capacitive touch sensors talking i2c. The X and Y coordinates of the touch, along with pressure are sent to the processor over the i2c bus, triggering an interrupt and offering quite a bit of opportunity for sound control.

Said sound control is, of course, done in MIDI. This lets the guitar control a whole variety of synths and/or software, and of course [Michael] is using more futuristic-sounding synths than a pack of guitar samples. That said, what exactly goes on with the MIDI controls is left frustratingly vague. Obviously fretting provides note selection, but does the touchpad just send a “note start” command, or are the X, Y and pressure data used in interesting ways? Is there multitouch support? The video doesn’t say.

How, exactly, the obviously-plastic body of the guitar was manufactured is also left unsaid. Is it a large resin print? SLS? It looks injection-molded, but that makes no sense for a one-off prototype. On the other hand, it looks like he’s selling these, so it may very well be an injection-molded production case we’re seeing being assembled here, and not a prototype at all.

For all the video leaves us wanting more information, we can’t help but admit the end product both looks and sounds very cool. (Skip to the 4:50 mark in the embedded video to hear it in action.) The only thing that would improve it would be a hurdy-gurdy mode. Thanks to [Michael] for the tip, and remember we want to hear tips about all the weird and wonderful hacked-together instruments you make or find on the web.

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