A Turing-Complete CPU In Sunvox? Why Not!

August 17, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 7 Comments

Day-time software engineer and part-time musician, [Logickin,] knows a thing or two about programming the SunVox modular synthesiser and tracker software. Whilst the software is normally used for creating music and sound effects, they decided to really push it, and create the VOXCOM-1610, a functional turing-complete CPU inside SunVox, just for fun.

For those who haven’t come across SunVox before now, this software is a highly programmable visual environment for building up custom synthesisers, piecing signals together to create rhythms — that’s the ‘tracker’ bit — as well as interfacing to input devices such as MIDI and many others. It does look like a lot of fun, but just like CPUs created in Minecraft, just because, this seems to be the first time someone has built one inside this particular music app. The VOXCOM 1610 is a fully functional 10 Hz, 16-bit computer. It boasts 2KB of ROM, 256 bytes of RAM (expandable to 128 KB), and 8 general registers for data exchange between components. If you don’t fancy manually poking bits into the ROM to enter your software, then you’re in luck as [Logickin] has provided an assembler (in Java) that should ease the process a lot. The ABI will look very familiar to anyone who’s ever touched assembler before, although as you’d expect, it is quite light on addressing modes.

Now, all that is needed is for someone to port Doom to this and we’ll have it all. We think that is unlikely to happen. For those who pay attention, we did see one neat SunVox project in the past, which is certainly eye-catching as well as eardrum-bursting.

Thanks to [elbien] for the tip!

GETMusic Uses Machine Learning To Generate Music, Understands Tracks

July 27, 2023 by Donald Papp 10 Comments

Music generation guided by machine learning can make great projects, but there’s not usually much apparent control over the results. The system makes what it makes, and it’s an achievement if the results are not obvious cacophony. But that’s all different with GETMusic which allows for a much more involved approach because it understands and is able to create music by tracks. Among other things, this means one can generate a basic rhythm and melody first, then add additional elements to those existing ones, leaving the previous elements unchanged.

GETMusic can make music from scratch, or guided from examples, and under the hood uses a diffusion-based approach similar to the method behind AI image generators like Stable Diffusion. We’ve previously covered how Stable Diffusion works, but instead of images the same basic principles are used to guide the model from random noise to useful tracks of music.

Just a few years ago we saw a neural network trained to generate Bach, and while it was capable of moments of brilliance, it didn’t produce uniformly-listenable output. GETMusic is on an entirely different level. The model and code are available online and there is a research paper to accompany it.

You can watch a video putting it through its paces just below the page break, and there are more videos on the project summary page.

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RoboPianist Is A Simulation For Advancing Robotic Control

July 21, 2023 by Lewin Day 10 Comments

Researchers at Google have posed themselves an interesting problem to solve: mastering the piano. However, they’re not trying to teach themselves, but a pair of simulated anthropomorphic robotic hands instead. Enter RoboPianist.

The hope is that the RoboPianist platform can help benchmark “high-dimensional control, targeted at testing high spatial and temporal precision, coordination, and planning, all with an underactuated system frequently making-and-breaking contacts.”

If that all sounds like a bit much to follow, the basic gist is that playing the piano takes a ton of coordination and control. Doing it in a musical way requires both high speed and perfect timing, further upping the challenge. The team hopes that by developing control strategies that can master the piano, they will more broadly learn about techniques useful for two-handed, multi-fingered control. To that end, RoboPianist models a pair of robot hands with 22 actuators each, or 44 in total. Much like human hands, the robot hands are underactuated by design, meaning they have less actuators than their total degrees of freedom.

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Building The Cheapest MIDI Home Studio From 1988

July 19, 2023 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

These days, there is a plethora of cheap hardware and software which you can use to make digital music. Back in the 1980s, though, this was still a nascent field, with new gear changing the game for musicians. In his latest video, [cTrix] puts together a guide to building a budget MIDI home studio like it’s 1988.

The original Atari ST is the star of the show, which sold for around £300 back then. Unlike most contemporary computers, it came with MIDI ports built-in, and it quickly became a popular platform for music sequencing and controlling external synth hardware. It was often spotted in posh studios being used by big-time musicians, but [cTrix] wanted to look at how it was used by more humble users.

While the Atari ST could output some passable chiptunes, it was most powerful when paired with off-board gear. Industry magazines would readily talk up “DIY” setups worth thousands, but [cTrix] aimed for a budget in the low hundreds. In 1988, that might get you something like the 16-channel Yamaha PSS-580, which rocked full MIDI support and a ton of sounds and drumkits built in. It ran an OPL soundchip, and could play multiple instruments at once under MIDI control from software like Dr. T’s MIDI Recording Studio.

Of course, if you’ve ever played a keyboard like the PSS-580, you’ll have noted that the sound output can be more than a little chintzy. A cheap way to level up was to get yourself something like the Roland MT-32, which rocked a far higher-quality sound module. Everything from slap bass to solid electric pianos could be blasted out from the Roland, which also included a decent reverb unit, too. [cTrix] also dives into other budget heroes, like the rich and expansive Kawai K1 and the Yamaha EMT-10.

If you want to make music like it’s 1988 and you’re hunting for your first gold record, you’ll learn a lot here. We can’t wait for Part 2, that explores the next level of sophistication in this era. His previous lessons on how to make 90s dance bangers on the Amiga are a treat, too.

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Roboticized Zelda Ocarina Plays Itself

July 13, 2023 by Lewin Day 10 Comments

[3DSage] has long been obsessed with a certain type of musical instrument after playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It spawned a project to robotically control an ocarina, which turned out beautifully.

The first step was to build an air blower that could excite the ocarina into making noise. With that completed, [3D Sage] then 3D scanned an ocarina so he could design a mechanism that would fit the instrument and let it be played. The final design uses a set of solenoids with rubber caps to plug the various holes of the ocarina to play different notes. The solenoids are actuated according to notes pressed on a printed keyboard. Alternatively, it can be programmed to play pre-stored songs by itself.

The results are charming, though the ocarina does sound a little off-pitch. Overall, though, the project is a great use case for a 3D scanner, since the instrument itself is such an odd irregular shape.

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Horror Instrument Is Truly Astounding To Listen To

July 12, 2023 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

Truly new musical instruments don’t come along every day; much of the low hanging fruit has already been taken. [Simon the Magpie] has been working on something that’s just a little innovative, and built what he refers to as an “Incredible Horror Instrument.” It’s all about feedback.

The build started with the Suzuki Andes 25F, a so-called “keyboard recorder.” It has the appearance of a melodion but produces flute-like sounds. [Simon]’s idea was to combine the breath-powered instrument with a talk box. If you’re unfamiliar, a talk box is designed for playing amplified guitar sounds through a tube that is placed in a player’s mouth so they can “shape” the guitar sound with their mouth.

In this role, though, the talk box’s input is hooked up to a microphone which captures the output of the Andes 25F. It then plays this back through a tube connected to the breath input of the Andes 25F. [Simon] thus created a feedback look that can effectively be “played” via the keyboard on the Andes 25F.

The audible results are eerie and haunting, and seem more than fitting for even a well-budgeted horror film. [Simon] also demonstrates some neat possibilities when combining the setup with a further feedback loop that feeds in other tones.

We’ve covered [Simon’s] work before; it’s often noisy and always entertaining. Video after the break.

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Ferrofluid Drum Synth Dances To The Beat

June 15, 2023 by Donald Papp 17 Comments

[Love Hultén]’s work often incorporates reactive sound elements, and his Ferrofluid drum synth is no exception. Sadly there are no real build details but have no fear: we’ve gathered plenty of DIY insights when it comes to ferrofluid-based projects.

Ferrofluid isn’t easy to work with, but there are plenty of DIY resources to make things easier.

First of all, ferrofluid is shockingly expensive stuff. But if you can get your hands on some old VHS tapes and acetone, you can make your own. Second, working with ferrofluid to make reactive elements is harder than it may look. Particularly, making the stuff dance to sound beats isn’t as simple as putting a container of the stuff in front of a speaker coil, but people have discovered a few ways that work more reliably than others.

[Love Hultén]’s drum synth was inspired by this custom Bluetooth speaker with dancing ferrofluid by [Dakd Jung], which drives an electromagnetic coil with frequencies selected from the audio with an MSGEQ7 equalizer. That way, only frequencies that work best for moving the fluid in interesting ways get used for the visualization. The MSGEQ7 spectrum analyzer chip is very useful for music-driven projects, as demonstrated by these sound-reactive LED shades which illustrate the audio element nicely.

The coils that create the electromagnetic field causing ferrofluid to move can take different forms, but two very interesting ones are this 12-layer PCB coil and for more intricate displays, there’s a 12×21 coil array that creates a dot-matrix-like display.

We have one last tip to share about enclosures. Some readers may have noticed that this drum synth project is housed in what looks like a piece of painted lumber. Wood is certainly a versatile material for making custom shapes, and for lettering and labels it turns out that toner transfer works just as well on wood as it does for making custom PCBs.

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