Generative AI Now Encroaching On Music

March 22, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 62 Comments

While it might not seem like it to a novice, music turns out to be a highly mathematical endeavor with precise ratios between chords and notes as well as overall structure of rhythm and timing. This is especially true of popular music which has even more recognizable repeating patterns and trends, making it unfortunately an easy target for modern generative AI which is capable of analyzing huge amounts of data and creating arguably unique creations. This one, called Suno, does just that for better or worse.

Unlike other generative AI offerings that are currently available for creating music, this one is not only capable of generating the musical underpinnings of the song itself but can additionally create a layer of intelligible vocals as well. A deeper investigation of the technology by Rolling Stone found that the tool uses its own models to come up with the music and then offloads the text generation for the vocals to ChatGPT, finally using the generated lyrics to generate fairly convincing vocals. Like image and text generation models that have come out in the last few years, this has the potential to be significantly disruptive.

While we’re not particularly excited about living in a world where humans toil while the machines create art and not the other way around, at best we could hope for a world where real musicians use these models as tools to enhance their creativity rather than being outright substitutes, much like ChatGPT itself currently is for programmers. That might be an overly optimistic view, though, and only time will tell.

Build Yourself A Vacuum Tube VU Meter

March 22, 2024 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

Volume unit (VU) meters are cool — it’s an undeniable fact. For some reason, humans just dig lights that flash along with sounds. You can build a VU meter using LEDs, or bulbs if you’re trapped in 1972. Or, you could use special vacuum tubes. [mircemk] did just that in their latest VU meter project.

The 6E2 vacuum tube is the part for the job in this case. You might think a specialist tube like this is expensive, but they can be had for just a few dollars from online retailers. They were often used as tuning indicators, but here, they’re used as a responsive VU meter instead. However, instead of a single bar going up and down, you get a pair of bars that raise to meet in the middle.

[mircemk] explains all the circuitry required to drive the tubes, and how to hook them up to create a two-channel stereo VU meter. The final circuit largely relies on a transistor, a diode, some passive components, and a DC-DC boost supply to generate 250 V for the tubes.

The final result looks pretty neat, particularly as it’s built into an old-school blue project box. We’ve seen similar projects from [mircemk] before, too. Continue reading “Build Yourself A Vacuum Tube VU Meter” →

A Tape Echo For Anyone

March 20, 2024 by Jenny List 8 Comments

If you’ve ever looked into how artists from the 1960s made their music, you’ll learn about the many inventive ways in which the tape recorder enabled new effects. One of the simplest of those is the tape echo, as distinct from a reverb which introduces the many delayed echoes of a large auditorium, an echo provides a single delayed version of the original. It’s something [Mark Gutierez] shows us as he makes a tape echo from a cheap Walkman-style cassette player. It’s hardly the highest quality of its ilk, but it does the job.

The player in question sports the ubiquitous Chinese mechanism that’s the last still in production. It has a radio incorporated which he doesn’t use, but for all that it has only a permanent magnet erase head rather than one driven from the bias oscillator. He first puts another head in the space between the record head and the pinch roller, then further modifies the cassette so a loop can be pulled out of the side of it, moving all heads off-board. As you can see in the video below the break it’s in no way high-fidelity, but with a couple of Eurorack mixer kits added on it makes for an interesting effect.

If you can lay your hands on a reel-to-reel machine, you can make a more traditional echo machine.

Continue reading “A Tape Echo For Anyone” →

2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: A Piano-Controlled Smart Home

March 19, 2024 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

There’s a scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where a little flap in the wall flips down to reveal a small organ embedded there. Gene Wilder plays a bit of Rachmaninoff on the organ, and the giant door to the chocolate room slowly creaks open.

Once [Nathan Orick] got this into his head, he couldn’t get it out, and had to give it a go in his own home. Regrettably there’s no chocolate rooms in the house, so he’s using various chords and melodies to do things like control the lights and the TV, as you’ll see in the video after the break. Although this one may have started as a joke of a home automation scheme, [Nathan] thinks it turned out pretty solid, and so do we.

He already had the piano and a Raspberry Pi Zero lying around, so getting this up and running was mostly about connections and code. Speaking of connections, [Nathan] was hard-pressed to find a micro-USB to USB-B cord, so he ended up splicing one together. Simple enough. The harder part was getting Linux to recognize the keyboard, but all it took was touching all the pins with a multimeter, evidently. What’s a project without a little magic?

And not only did it show up, Linux went to the trouble of registering it as a MIDI device all on its own. Once [Nathan] obtained the port number, he had data printing to the console every time he played a note. Then it was mostly a matter of writing code to interact with MIDI data and track the notes as they’re played, and put it all together with Home Assistant. Be sure to check out the brief demo after the break.

Continue reading “2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: A Piano-Controlled Smart Home” →

Ancient Instrument Goes Digital: The Digi-Gurdy

March 18, 2024 by Donald Papp 12 Comments

The hurdy-gurdy is a fascinating string instrument dating from sometime around the 10th century. There is an active community of modern enthusiasts, but one can’t simply walk into a music shop and buy one. That’s where [XenonJohn] and the Digi-Gurdy come in, bringing some nice features while maintaining all the important elements of the original.

The mechanical keys and crank of the Hurdy-Gurdy are preserved in this modern digital incarnation.

The hurdy-gurdy works by droning strings with a rotating wheel, and the player applies pressure to those strings via keys to play combinations of notes. Here’s a video demonstrating what it sounds like to play one, and one can see a conceptual resemblance to bagpipes, among other things.

The Digi-Gurdy is a modern electronic version that maintains the mechanical elements while sending MIDI signals over USB. It has options for line-out or headphone output. A thriving online community has shaped its development since its inception years ago.

We hope this leaves you wanting to know more because [XenonJohn] has loads of details to share. The main website at digigurdy.com is jam-packed with information about this instrument and its construction, and the project page on Hackaday.io has more nitty-gritty design details and source files for those who crave hardware specifics.

If [XenonJohn]’s name sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve admired his work on DIY self-balancing vehicles over the years. He also submitted an earlier version as an entry into the Hackaday Prize. His careful attention to detail shines through. Check out the two videos (embedded just below the page break): the first demonstrates the Digi-Gurdy, and the second shows off the construction and insides. You’d think a MIDI hurdy-gurdy would be unique, but, actually, we’ve seen more than one.

Continue reading “Ancient Instrument Goes Digital: The Digi-Gurdy” →

The Most Famous Room In Rock-n-Roll You’ve Never Seen

March 17, 2024 by Jenny List 6 Comments

The study of audio technology has a lot of fascinating branches, and one or two of them even take the curious engineer not into electronics but into architecture. There’s the anechoic chamber with its complete lack of echo, but at the other end of the scale, there’s the echo chamber.

It’s normal in 2024 when searching for reverb to reach for a software plugin, but following the effect back through silicon, spring lines, and metal plates to the 1950s, we find an echo chamber as a real room with a speaker and a microphone placed in it. [Rick Beato] takes us into the echo chamber, starting with one of the few remaining originals and probably the one whose effect has been heard on the most highly-charting music, at the famous Abbey Road studio in London.

The video below the break is broadly in two parts, with the first concentrating on the Abbey Road chamber and the second showing how an empty room in a house can be used to make your own. It’s aimed at musicians rather than hardware hackers but we think it’s one of those moments of crossover that readers might find interesting. We were particularly curious about the tall ceramic tubes in the Abbey Road chamber, designed to further break up the sound waves for a greater depth of reverb.

The video shows how reverb can be achieved with just a room, but don’t worry if you’re space limited. A plate reverb needn’t break the bank. Or, grab a spring.

Continue reading “The Most Famous Room In Rock-n-Roll You’ve Never Seen” →

Playing Audio On The Pi Pico With No DAC To Speak Of

March 12, 2024 by Lewin Day 24 Comments

Normally, if you want to play music or other audio on a microcontroller, you need to get yourself a DAC. Or at least, that’s the easiest way to go about it and the one most likely to get you good, intelligible audio. You don’t have to go that way, though, as [antirez] demonstrates.

[antirez] decided to do this with a Pi Pico, but it’s applicable to other microcontrollers too. It’s all done with a single pin and a PWM output. The PWM output is set to a very high frequency beyond human hearing. In this case, it was 100 KHz. Then, the duty cycle of the PWM is changed to essentially output various average voltage levels at the pin. Vary the output voltage as per your desired sound file by using each sample to vary the duty cycle of the PWM. Voila! You can output whatever sound you want on that pin! [antirez] steps through the basics of doing this, including processing simple WAV files into a raw format that can be dumped into MicroPython code.

There’s no sound sample on the project page, and we’d have to assume it sounds pretty crunchy when hooked up to a speaker. And yet, it could prove a useful technique if you’re designing your own audio greeting cards or something, so keep that in mind!