Musical Motors, BLDC Edition

September 12, 2025 by Tyler August 21 Comments

This should count as a hack: making music from a thing that should not sing. In this case, [SIROJU] is tickling the ivories with a Brushless DC motor, or BLDC.

To listen to a performance, jump to 6:27 in the embedded video. This BLDC has a distinctly chip-tune like sound, not entirely unlike other projects that make music with stepper motors. Unlike most stepper-based instruments we’ve seen [SIROJU]’s BLDC isn’t turning as it sings. He’s just got it vibrating by manipulating the space vector modulation that drives the motor — he gets a response of about 10 kHz that way. Not CD-quality, no, but plenty for electronic music. He can even play chords of up to 7 notes at a time.

There’s no obvious reason he couldn’t embed the music into a proper motor-drive signal, and thus allow a drone to hum it’s own theme song as it hovers along. He’s certainly got the chops for it; if you haven’t seen [SIROJU]’s videos on BLDC drivers on YouTube, you should check out his channel. He’s got a lot of deep content about running these ubiquitous motors. Sure, we could have just linked to him showing you how to do FOC on an STM32, but “making it sing” is an expression for mastery in English, and a lot more fun besides.

There are other ways to make music with motors. If you know of any others, don’t hesitate to send us a tip.

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Round And Round With A Tape Delay Synth

September 11, 2025 by Jenny List 6 Comments

Over the years we’ve been entertained by an array of musical projects from [Look Mum No Computer], and his latest is no exception. It’s a tape delay, loop generator, and synth all in one. Confused? That’s what you get if you position a load of tape heads around a rotating disk with magnetic tape on its perimeter.

Taking a circular piece of inch-thick Perspex, he wraps a length of one inch tape round its perimeter. This is placed as though it were a turntable on a stepper motor with variable speed, and the tape heads are positioned around its edge. Each read head feeds its own preamp which in turn drives a mixer array, and there’s also a record head and an erase head. If you’ve ever played with tape loops you’ll immediately understand the potential for feedback and sequence generation to make interesting sounds. There’s a lot of nuance to the build, in designing the mount for the motor to stop the enclosure flexing, in using a gearbox for increased torque, and in balancing the disk.

The result is as much an effect as it is an instrument in its own right, particularly in its prototype phase when the read head was movable. We’re treated to a demo/performance, and we look forward to perhaps seeing this in person at some point. There’s a future video promised in which a fix should come for a click caused by the erase circuitry, and he’ll make a more compact enclosure for it. Continue reading “Round And Round With A Tape Delay Synth” →

Theremin-Style MIDI Controller Does It With Lasers

September 7, 2025 by Tyler August 7 Comments

Strictly speaking, a Theremin uses a pair of antennae that act as capacitors in a specific R/C circuit. Looking at [aritrakdebnath2003]’s MIDI THEREMIN, we see it works differently, but it does play in the manner of the exotic radio instrument, so we suppose it can use the name.

The MIDI THEREMIN is purely a MIDI controller. It sends note data to a computer or synthesizer, and from there, you can get whatever sound at whatever volume you desire. The device’s brain is an Arduino Uno, and MIDI-out for the Arduino has been a solved problem for a long while now.

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The Qweremin Is A QWERTY Theremin With A C-64 Heart

August 30, 2025 by Tyler August 5 Comments

While we have nothing against other 1980s 8-bit machines, the Commodore 64 has always been something special. A case in point: another new instrument using the C-64 and its beloved SID chip. Not just new to retrocomputing, either, but new entirely. [Linus Åkesson] has invented the QWERTY Theremin, and there’s a Commodore at its core.

If this project sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it’s based off of the C-64 Theremin [Linus] built a couple of years back. According to [Linus], there were a few issues with the instrument. A real thereminist told him there were issues with the volume response; his own experience taught him that theremins are very, very hard to play for the uninitiated.

This model fixes both problems: first, the volume circuit now includes a pair of digital-analog-converters (DACs) connected to the Commodore’s user port, allowing smooth and responsive volume control.In this case the DAC is being used solely for volume control: SID provides the analog reference voltage, while the 12-bit digital input served as volume control. That proved noisy, however, thanks to the DC bias voltage of the audio output being scaled by the DAC even when the SID was silent. A second DAC was the answer, providing a signal to cancel out the scaled bias voltage. That in and of itself is a clever hack.

The biggest change is that this instrument no longer plays like a theremin. Pitch has been taken out of the 555-based antenna circuit entirely; while vertical distance from the spoon-antenna still controls volume as in a regular theremin and the last version, the horizontal distance from the second antenna (still a clamp) now controls vibrato. Pitch is now controlled by the QWERTY keyboard. That’s a much easier arrangement for [Linus] — this isn’t his first chiptune QWERTY instrument, after all.

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A PLL For Perfect Pitch

August 24, 2025 by Jenny List 5 Comments

When Hackaday runs a contest, we see all manner of clever projects. But inevitably there are some we don’t see, because their builders didn’t manage to get them finished in time. [Park Frazer]’s phase-locked loop is one of them. The circuit is an all-discrete PLL that derives a 440 Hz output from a 1 Hz input, and it arrived just too late for our 1 Hz contest.

If you aren’t familiar with a phase-locked loop, in this context you can think of them as a programmable frequency multiplier. A voltage-controlled oscillator is locked to an input frequency by comparing the two with a phase detector. Multiplication can be achieved by putting a frequency divider between the oscillator and the phase detector. It’s at the same time a complex and easy to understand circuit. In this case, when broken down into a set of multivibrators, it makes sense. The charge pump phase detector is a little different from the XOR gate we were expecting, but as he explains, it’s better.

If PLLs are a mystery, have a look at this video from a [Jeri Ellsworth] and [Bil Herd].

Replicating The World’s Oldest Stringed Instrument

August 21, 2025 by Tyler August 10 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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