Hacking Nature’s Musicians

October 20, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 3 Comments

We just wrapped up the Musical Instrument Challenge in the Hackaday Prize, and for most projects that meant replicating sounds made by humans, or otherwise making musicians for humans. There’s more to music than just what can be made in a DAW, though; the world is surrounded by a soundscape, and you only need to take a walk in the country to hear it.

For her Hackaday Prize entry, [Kelly] is hacking nature’s musicians. She’s replicating the sounds of the rural countryside in transistors and PCBs. It’s an astonishing work of analog electronics, and it sounds awesome, too.

The most impressive board [Kelly] has been working on is the Mother Nature Board, a sort of natural electronic chorus of different animal circuits. It’s all completely random, based on a Really, Really Random Number Generator, and uses a collection of transistors and 555 timers to create pulses sent to a piezo. This circuit is very much sensitive to noise, and while building it [Kelly] found that not all of her 2N3904 transistors were the same; some of them worked for the noise generator, some didn’t. This is a tricky circuit to design, but the results are delightful.

So, can analog electronics sound like a forest full of crickets? Surprisingly, yes. This demonstration shows what’s possible with a few breadboards full of transistors, caps, resistors, and LEDs. It’s an electronic sculpture of the sounds inspired by the nocturnal soundscape of rural Virginia. You’ve got crickets, cicadas, katydids, frogs, birds, and all the other non-human musicians in the world. Beautiful.

An Open Controller For Woodwind Instruments

October 19, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

Engineers, hackers, and makers can most certainly build a musical gadget of some kind. They’ll build synths, they’ll build aerophones, and they’ll take the idea of mercury delay line memory, two hydrophones, and a really long tube filled with water to build the most absurd delay in existence. One thing they can’t seem to do is build a woodwind MIDI controller. That’s where [J.M.] comes in. He’s created the Open Woodwind Project as an open and extensible interface that can play sax and clarinet while connected to a computer.

Early prototype to test out variable resistive pressure pads

If you want to play MIDI, there are plenty of options for keyboards, drum sets, matrix pads, and even strings. If you want to play a MIDI saxophone, there aren’t many options. Keytars, for example, are more popular than MIDI woodwind controllers. [J.M.] is changing this with a MIDI controller that recreates electronic aerophones electronically.

The controller itself uses a Teensy 3.2 loaded up with an ARM Cortex M4, two MPR121 touch controllers for 24 channels of capacititve touch capability, and a pressure sensor to tell the computer how strong the user is blowing. All of this works, and [J.M.] has a few videos showing off the capabilities of his homemade controller. It’s a great piece of work, and there are a few extentions that make this really interesting: there’s the possibility of adding CV out so it can be connected to modular synths, and the addition of accelerometers to the build makes for some very interesting effects.

Check out the video below.

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Sonic Robots Don’t Play Instruments, They Are The Instruments

October 17, 2018 by Donald Papp 7 Comments

[Moritz Simon Geist]’s experiences as both a classically trained musician and a robotics engineer is clearly what makes his Techno Music Robots project so stunningly executed. The robotic electronic music he has created involves no traditional instruments of any kind. Instead, the robots themselves are the instruments, and every sound comes from some kind of physical element.

A motor might smack a bit of metal, a hard drive arm might tap out a rhythm, and odder sounds come from stranger devices. If it’s technological and can make a sound, [Moritz Simon Geist] has probably carefully explored whether it can be turned into one of his Sonic Robots. The video embedded below is an excellent example of his results, which is electronic music without a synthesizer in sight.

We’ve seen robot bands before, and they’re always the product of some amazing work. The Toa Mata Lego Band are small Lego units and Compressorhead play full-sized instruments on stage, but robots that are the instruments is a different direction that still keeps the same physical element to the music.

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Modular Violin Takes A Bow

October 16, 2018 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

They say the only difference between a violin and a fiddle is the way you play it. If that’s so, this modular violin will need a new name, since it can be broken apart and changed in ways that make it sound completely different, all within a few minutes.

The fiddle is the work of [David Perry] and has 3D printed body, neck, pegbox, and bridge. While it might seem useful on the surface as a way to get less expensive instruments out in the world where virtually anyone has access to them, the real interesting qualities are shown when [David] starts playing all of the different versions he’s created. The sound changes in noticeable ways depending on the style of print, type of plastic used, and many other qualities.

Of course you will need a bow, strings, pegs, and a fingerboard, but the rest is all available if you have a 3D printer around. If you’re already a skilled violinist this could be a very affordable way to experiment with new sounds. It’s not the first time we’ve seen 3D printed violins, but it is the first time we’ve seen them designed specifically to alter the way they sound rather than their physical characteristics. If you want to make your own, all of the .stl files are available on the project’s site.

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Listen To A Song Made From Custom Nintendo LABO Waveform Cards

October 14, 2018 by Donald Papp 2 Comments

[Hunter Irving] has been busy with the Nintendo LABO’s piano for the Nintendo Switch. In particular he’s been very busy creating his own custom waveform cards, which greatly expands the capabilities of the hackable cardboard contraption. If this sounds familiar, it’s because we covered his original method of creating 3D printed waveform cards that are compatible with the piano, but he’s taken his work further since then. Not only has he created new and more complex cards by sampling instruments from Super Nintendo games, he’s even experimented with cards based on vowel sounds in an effort to see just how far things can go. By layering the right vowel sounds just so, he was able to make the (barely identifiable) phrases I-LIKE-YOU, YOU-LIKE-ME, and LET’S-A-GO.

Those three phrases make up the (vaguely recognizable) lyrics of a song he composed using his custom waveform cards for the Nintendo LABO’s piano, appropriately titled I Like You. The song is at the 6:26 mark in the video embedded below, but the whole video is worth a watch to catch up on [Hunter]’s work. The song is also hosted on soundcloud.

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Synthesizing Mother Nature’s Sounds Like You’ve Never Seen Before

October 14, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 13 Comments

We’ve all heard the range of sounds to be made electronically from mostly discrete components, but what [Kelly Heaton] has achieved with her many experiments is a whole other world, the world of nature to be exact. Her seemingly chaotic circuits create a nighttime symphony of frogs, crickets, and katydids, and a pleasant stroll through her Hackaday.io logs makes how she does it crystal clear and is surely as delightful as taking a nocturnal stroll through her Virginia countryside.

The visual and aural sensations of the video below will surely tempt you further, but in case it doesn’t, here’s a taste. When Radio Shack went out of business, she lost her source of very specific piezo buzzers and so had to reverse engineers theirs to build her own, right down to making her own amplifiers on circular circuit boards and vacuum forming and laser cutting the housings. For the sounds, she starts out with a simple astable multivibrator circuit, demonstrating how to create asymmetry by changing capacitors, and then combining two of the circuits to get something which sounds just like a cricket. She then shows how to add katydids which enhance the nighttime symphony with percussive sounds much like a snare drum or hi-hat. It’s all tied together with her Mother Nature Board built up from a white noise generator, Schmitt trigger, and shift registers to turn on and off the different sound circuits, providing a more unpredictable and realistic nighttime soundscape. The video below shows the combined result, though she admits she’ll never really be finished. And be sure to check out even more photos and videos of her amazing work in the gallery on her Hackaday.io page.

For the more familiar range of sounds, though no less varied, check out our own [Elliot William’s] series, Logic Noise, where he takes us through an extensive exploration of a less Mother Naturely soundscape.

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The 3D Printed Guitar

October 10, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

We just wrapped up the Musical Instrument Challenge in the Hackaday Prize, and that means we’re sorting through a ton of inventive electronic musical instruments. For whatever reason we can’t seem to find many non-electronic instruments. Yes, MPCs are cool, but so are strings and vibrating columns of air. That’s what makes this entry special: it’s a 3D printed physical guitar. But it’s also got a hexaphonic pickup, there are lights in the fretboard, and it talks to a computer for PureData processing.

First, the construction of this guitar. It’s mostly 3D printed, with the ‘frame’ of the body made in a Creality 3D printer. It’s a bolt-on neck with a telecaster body, but the core of this guitar — where the pickups and bridge attach — are made out of aluminum extrusion. Another piece of aluminum extrusion runs down the neck, which is clad in a 3D-printed ‘back’ that looks ‘comfortable enough’. The headstock is bolted onto the end of this neck, and it seems reasonably tolerant of having a hundred pounds or so of strings pulling on it. The bridge is also 3D printed, with the saddles integrated into the print. Conventional wisdom says this would sound terrible, but nylon saddles were a thing back in the day, so we’re just going to roll with it.

The electronics are where this project really shines. The pickup is a salvaged Roland GK3 hexaphonic deal, with six outputs for each string. This is sent into a Teensy with an audio path for each individual string. Audio processing happens in the guitar, and latency is under five milliseconds, which is quick enough to not be a terrible distraction.

Except for synths and drum machines and computers, the last fifty or so years of technological progress hasn’t really made it to the world of musical instruments. Guitarists, especially, are technophobes who hate everything invented after 1963. While the neck of [Frank]’s ElektroCaster probably doesn’t feel great, this is a really interesting instrument and a great entry to the Hackaday Prize.