Musical Hacks

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Programming The 6581 Sound Interface Device (SID) With The 6502

November 10, 2025 by No comments

Over on YouTube, [Ben Eater] pursues that classic 8-bit sound. In this video, [Ben] integrates the MOS Technology 6581 Sound Interface Device (SID) with his homegrown 6502. The 6581 SID was famously used in the Commodore line of computers, perhaps most notably in the Commodore 64.

The 6581 SID supports three independent voices, each consisting of a tone oscillator/waveform generator, an envelope generator, and an amplitude modulator. These voices are combined into an output filter along with a volume control. [Ben] goes into detail concerning how to configure each of these voices using the available facilities on the available pins, referencing the datasheet for the details.

[Ben]’s video finishes with an 8-bit hit from all the way back in October 1985: Monty on the Run by Rob Hubbard. We first heard about [Ben’s] musical explorations back in June. If you missed it, be sure to check it out. It seems hard to imagine that demand for these chips has been strong for decades and shows little sign of subsiding.

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Folding Lamp Becomes A Tasty Reverb Tank

November 3, 2025 by 6 Comments

If you’re a musician and you want a reverb effect, there are lots of ways to go about it. You can use software plugins, all kinds of rack-mount effects, or pedals. Or, as [David] has done, you could go with a lamp.

[David’s] build is straightforward enough in concept—he just chose a relatively unconventional item to use as a reverb tank. The lamp might seem like an odd choice, but it actually does a decent job at resonating because of its metal construction and the multiple springs that tension the structure. [David] turns the lamp into a reverb by fitting it with a Vidsonix Ghost audio transducer to put sound into the structure—picture the magnetic driver of a loudspeaker without the cone fitted, and you get the idea. Piezo elements were then used as contact mics to pick up reverberations from the lamp itself. Everything was assembled with a bunch of lab stands that give the build a rather nice aesthetic. The reverb time isn’t particularly long, but the sound is hauntingly beautiful.

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10 Cent Microcontroller Makes Tracker Music

October 29, 2025 by 17 Comments

We are absurdly spoiled these days by our microcontrollers. Take the CH32V00X family– they’ve been immortalized by meme as “the ten cent micro” but with a clock speed of 48MHz and 32-bit registers to work with, they’re astoundingly capable machines even by the standards of home computers of yore. That’s what motivated [Tim] to see if he could use one to play MOD files, with only minimal extra parts– and quite specifically no DAC.

Well, that’s part of what motivated him. The other part was seeing Hackaday feature someone use a CH32V003 making chiptune-like beeps. [Tim] apparently saw that post as a gauntlet thrown down, and he picked it up with an even smaller chip: the CH32V002, which he proceeded to turn into a MOD player. For those of you who slept through 80s and early 90s (or for those precocious infants reading this who hadn’t then yet been born), MOD files are an  electronic music format, pioneered on the Amiga home computers. Like MIDI, the file specifies when to play specific voices rather than encoding the sound directly. Unlike MIDI, MOD files are self-contained, with the samples/voices used being stored inside the file. The original version targeted four-channel sound, and that’s what [Tim] is using here.

As you can see from the demo video, it sounds great. He pulled it off by using the chip’s built-in PWM timer. Since the timer’s duty cycle is determined by a variable that can be changed by DMA, the CPU doesn’t end up with very much to do here. In the worst case, with everything in flash memory instead of SRAM, the CPU is only taxed at 24%, so there’s plenty of power to say, add graphics for a proper demo. Using the existing MODPlay Library, [Tim]’s player fits into 4kB of memory, leaving a perfectly-usable 12kB for the MOD file. As far as external components needed, it’s just an RC filter to get rid of PWM noise.

[Tim] has put his code up on GitHub for anyone interested, and has perhaps inadvertently cast down another gauntlet for anyone who wants to use these little RISC V microprocessors for musical tasks. If you can do better, please do, let us know.

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10 Cent Microcontroller Makes Music

October 23, 2025 by 11 Comments

Compared to the old 8-bit Arduinos, it’s incredible how cheap modern microcontrollers like the ESP32 have become. But there are even cheaper options out there if you don’t need that kind of horsepower, and are willing to do a little work yourself, as [atomic14] demonstrates.

The CH32V003 is a dirt cheap microcontroller—which can reportedly be had for as little as 10 cents if you know where to look. It’s not the most powerful chip by any means, boasting just 16 K flash, and 2 K of SRAM. However, it is a 32-bit RISC V machine, and it does run at 48 MHz—giving it a leg up on many 8-bit parts that are still out there.

Surprisingly there aren’t a whole lot of CH32V003 products for the maker market, so if you want to play with it, you’ll probably need to spin up your own boards. [atomic14] does just that, showing us how the chip can be put to good use by turning it into a little musical trinket. It’s a fun demo, and a great way to get to grips with programming on a new microcontroller platform.

It’s hard to get more chiptune than a 10 cent chip beeping its little head off. How could possibly justify spending tens of dollars modding a Game Boy when this exists, even if it sounds like a caffeinated greeting card?

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The PDP-1 Can Sound Hauntingly Beautiful

October 21, 2025 by 13 Comments

The chiptune music scene is largely rooted in the sounds of the original Nintendo Game Boy and the Commodore 64, while still welcoming a wide range of other hardware under its general umbrella. Still, few chip musicians show up to a gig hauling a PDP-1. That’s perhaps a shame, given that the 1950s era machine can produce beautiful music—as demonstrated by [Peter Samson] and [Joe Lynch].

The video demonstration was recorded at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. [Peter Samson] is operating the PDP-1, which is running the Harmony Compiler—which allows the machine to play four individual voices. This is achieved by taking advantage of the PDP-1’s program flags, which are visible as six light bulbs on the control panel. Instructions can be used to turn these bulbs on and off. The Harmony Compiler works by switching the bulbs on and off fast enough to create audible square waves when the light bulb outputs are wired to a simple audio amplifier.

Using Harmony Compiler, [Joe] and [Peter] worked together to transcribe the song Olson by Boards of Canada to play on the PDP-1. The song is encoded on paper tape, and fed into the machine—which dutifully plays back the hauntingly beautiful melody.

If you’re interested in the code that achieved this, it’s blessedly available via Github. If you love stories about old computers playing music, we’ve got those too. Video after the break.

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Live Coding Techno With Strudel

October 16, 2025 by 15 Comments

The super talented [Switch Angel] is an electronic music artist, with a few cool YouTube videos to show off their absolute nailing of how to live code with Strudel. For us mere mortals, Strudel is a JavaScript port of TidalCycles, which is an algorithmic music generator which supports live coding, i.e. the music that is passed down to the synthesizer changes on-the-fly as you manipulate the code. It’s magical to watch (and listen!) to how you can adapt and distort the music to your whims just by tweaking a few lines of code: no compilation steps, hardly any debugging and instant results.

The traditional view of music generators like this is to create lists of note/instrument pairs with appropriate modifiers. Each sound is specified in sequence — adding a sound extends the sequence a little. Strudel / Tidalcycles works a little differently and is based on the idea of repeating patterns over a fixed time. Adding an extra sound or breaking down one sound slot into multiple sounds squeezes all the remaining slots down, causing the whole pattern to repeat in the same period, with the sounds individually taking up less space. This simple change makes it really easy to add layer upon layer of interest within a sequence with a few extra characters, without recalculating everything else to fit. On top of this base, multiple effects can be layered—more than we can mention here—and all can be adjusted with pop-in sliders directly in the code.

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A Casio Toy Synth Is Ready To ROCK!

October 11, 2025 by 7 Comments

There is likely to be more than one of you who has eyed up a child’s toy synthesizer in a second hand store, and considered making something more impressive with it. In many cases these instruments are underwhelming, having a very small subset of functions based into their black-epoxy-blob microcontrollers.

[Make Something] found a Casio toy synth that has a few more functions than the average model, and with the addition of some extra effects electronics and a beautifully made case, turned it into an altogether more interesting instrument.

Most of the video has an element of workshop porn about it, as he makes a very nice Moog-style console case for it, a task made easier by an impressive array of CNC tools. The electronics are slightly more interesting, being a selection of cheap guitar pedals gutted and combined with a cheap tube preamp board. The result is a machine capable of some far more interesting sounds

We think many Hackaday readers would be able to repeat these functions from scratch without the pedals, and while the case is a thing of beauty it’s likely a decent job could be done with a little less finesse on more commonplace tools. Perhaps it’s worth giving those toy synths a second look, because they really can be had for pennies if you look hard enough. Perhaps it’s an easier option than a previous toy musical upgrade.

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