midi

377 Articles

Pulling Music Out Of Thin Air With A Raspberry Pi

February 15, 2018 by 1 Comment

Pianos are great instruments, but being rather heavy and requiring a fair amount of space they are certainly not known for their convenience. Sure, there are more portable varieties available, but they rarely resemble the elegance and classiness of a grand piano. One option is of course to build a downscaled version yourself — and since you’re already customizing the instrument, why stop at the way you play it. [2fishy] didn’t stop there either and ended up with a wooden, space friendly, light controlled piano housing a Raspberry Pi.

Inspired by the concept of a laser harp, [2fishy] followed the same principle but chose a simpler and safer alternative by using LEDs instead. For each playable tone, a LED is mounted opposite a light dependent resistor, creating an array of switches that is then connected to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins. A Python script is handling the rest, polling the GPIO states and — with a little help from pygame, triggering MIDI playback whenever the light stream is interrupted.

There are enough LED/LDR pairs to play one full octave and have some additional control inputs for menu and octave shifting. This concept will naturally require some adjustments to your playing — you can get an idea of it in the demonstration video after the break. And if this design is still not the right size for you, or if you prefer to play in total darkness, this similar MIDI instrument using ultrasonic distance sensors could be of interest.

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Putting The Pi In Piano

January 31, 2018 by 10 Comments

Working on a PhD in composition, [Stephen Coyle] spends a fair bit of time at his electric keyboard. Setting himself up to work can be a bit of a task, so he felt he could improve the process and make it easy as Pi.

Finding it an odious task indeed to use notation software, connecting his laptop to his keyboard is a must — avoiding a warren of wires in the move is a similar priority. And, what if he could take advantage of the iPad’s unique offerings too? Well, a Raspberry Pi Zero W running Ravelox — an RTP MIDI protocol — makes  his music available on his network to record on whichever device he pleases.

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Swarm Of Servos Plays This Robotic Glockenspiel

November 23, 2017 by 7 Comments

It’s the happiest sounding instrument in the marching band, and it’s got the best name to boot. It’s the glockenspiel, and if this robotic glockenspiel has anything to say about it, the days of human glockenspielists are numbered.

In its present prototype form, [Averton Engineering]’s “Spielatron” looks a little like something from a carousel calliope or an animatronic pizza restaurant band. Using a cast-off glockenspiel from a school music room as a base, the Spielatron uses four mallets to play all the notes. Each key is struck by a mallet secured to a base made of two servos. For lack of more descriptive mallet terminology, these servos provide pan and tilt so the mallet can strike the proper keys. The video below shows the Spielatron’s first recital.

An Arduino runs the servos and a MIDI interface; unfortunately, this version can’t play chords and is a little limited on note length, but upgrades are on the way. We’ve seen a robotic glockenspiel before with a similar design that might have some ideas for increasing performance. But if you’re looking for a more sublime sound, check out this dry ice-powered wind chime.

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Pocket Woodwind MIDI Controller Helps You Carry A Tune

November 13, 2017 by 9 Comments

It’s easy to become obsessed with music, especially once you start playing. You want to make music everywhere you go, which is completely impractical. Don’t believe me? See how long you can get away with whistling on the subway or drumming your hands on any number of bus surfaces before your fellow passengers revolt. There’s a better way, and that way is portable USB MIDI controllers.

[Johan] wanted a pocket-sized woodwind MIDI controller, but all the existing ones he found were too big and bulky to carry around. With little more than a Teensy and a pressure sensor, he created TeensieWI.  It uses the built-in cap sense library to read input from the copper tape keys, generate MIDI messages, and send them over USB or DIN. Another pair of conductive pads on the back allow for octave changes. [Johan] later added a PSP joystick to do pitch bends, modulation, and glide. This is a simple build that creates a versatile instrument.

You don’t actually blow air into the mouthpiece—just let it escape from the sides of your mouth instead. That might take some getting used to if you’ve developed an embouchure. The values are determined by a pressure sensor that uses piezoresistivity to figure out how hard you’re blowing. There’s a default breath response value that can be configured in the settings.

TeensiWI should be easy to replicate or remix into any suitable chassis, though the UV-reactive acrylic looks pretty awesome. [Johan]’s documentation on IO is top-notch and includes a user guide with a fingering chart. For all you take-my-money types out there, [Johan] sells ’em ready to rock on Tindie. Check out the short demo clips after the break.

We saw a woodwind MIDI controller a few years ago that was eventually outfitted with an on-board synthesizer. Want to build a MIDI controller ? , like this beautiful build that uses hard drive platters as jog wheels.

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MIDI And A Real Vox Humana Come To A Century-Old Melodeon

October 15, 2017 by 6 Comments

A hundred years or more of consumer-level recorded music have moved us to a position in which most of us unconsciously consider music to be a recorded rather than live experience. Over a century ago this was not the case, and instead of a hi-fi or other device, many households would have had some form of musical instrument for their own entertainment. The more expensive ones could become significant status symbols, and there was a thriving industry producing pianos and other instruments for well-to-do parlours everywhere.

One of these parlour instruments came the way of [Alec Smecher], a pump organ, also known as a harmonium, or a melodeon. He’s carefully added a MIDI capability to it, and thus replaced its broken “Vox Humana” tremolo effect intended as a 19th century simulation of a choir, with a set of genuine human sounds. There is an almost Monty Python quality to his demonstration of this real Vox Humana, as you can see in the video below.

Lest you think though that he’s gutted the organ in the process of conversion, be rest assured that this is a sensitively applied piece of work. A microswitch has been placed beneath each key, leaving the original mechanism intact and working. An Arduino Leonardo has the microswitches multiplexed into a matrix similar to a keyboard, and emulates a USB MIDI device. It’s fair to say that it therefore lacks the force sensitivity you might need to emulate a piano, but it does result in rather an attractive MIDI instrument that also doubles as a real organ.

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MIDISWAY Promises To Step Up Your Live Show

October 8, 2017 by 13 Comments

If you like to read with gentle music playing, do yourself a favor and start the video while you’re reading about [Hugo Swift]’s MIDISWAY. The song is Promises, also by [SWIFT], which has piano phrases modulated during the actual playing, not in post-production.

The MIDISWAY is a stage-worthy looking box to sit atop your keys and pulse a happy little LED. The pulsing corresponds to the amount of pitch bending being sent to your instrument over a MIDI DIN connector. This modulation is generated by an Arduino and meant to recreate the effect of analog recording devices like an off-center vinyl or a tape that wasn’t tracking perfectly.

While recording fidelity keeps inching closer to perfect recreation, it takes an engineer like [Hugo Swift] to decide that a step backward is worth a few days of hacking. Now that you know what the MIDISWAY is supposed to do, listen closely at 2:24 in the video when the piano starts. The effect is subtle but hard to miss when you know what to listen for.

MIDI projects abound at Hackaday like this MIDI → USB converter for getting MIDI out of your keyboard once you’ve modulated it with a MIDISWAY. Maybe you are more interested in a MIDI fighter for controlling your DAW. MIDI is a robust and time-tested protocol which started in the early 1980s and will be around for many more years.

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Cheap DIY MIDI To USB Adapter

September 26, 2017 by 14 Comments

[Joonas] became frustrated with cheap but crappy MIDI to USB converters, and the better commercial ones were beyond his budget. He used a Teensy LC to build one for himself and it did the job quite well. But he needed several converters, and using the Teensy LC was going to cost him a lot more than he was willing to spend. With some tinkering, he was able to build one using an Adafruit Pro Trinket which has onboard hardware UART (but no USB). This lack of USB support was a deal killer for him, so after hunting some more he settled on a clone of the Sparkfun Pro Micro. Based on the ATmega32U4, these clones were just right for his application, and the cheapest to boot. He reckons it cost him about $5 to build each of his cheap USB MIDI adapters which receive notes and pedal data from the keyboard’s MIDI OUT and transmit them to a computer

Besides the Pro Micro clone, the only other parts he used are a generic opto-coupler, a couple of resistors and a MIDI connector. After testing his simple circuit on a bread board, he managed to squeeze it all inside an old USB dongle housing, stuffing it in dead-bug style.

The heavy lifting is all done in the firmware, for which [Joonas] used LUFA — the Lightweight USB Framework for AVR’s. He wrote his own code to handle MIDI (UART) to USB MIDI messages conversion. The interesting part is his use of a 32.15 kbps baud rate even though the MIDI specification requires 31.25 kbps. He found that a slightly higher baud rate fixes a problem in the AVR USART implementation which tends to miss consecutive bytes due to the START edge not being detected. Besides this, his code is limited in functionality to only handle a few messages, mainly for playing a piano, and does not have full-fledged MIDI capabilities.

We’ve featured several of [Joonas]’s hacks here over the years, the most recent being the Beaglebone Pin-Toggling Torture Test and from earlier, How to Turn A PC On With a Knock And An ATTiny.