music

451 Articles

The PDP-1 Can Sound Hauntingly Beautiful

October 21, 2025 by 11 Comments

The chiptune music scene is largely rooted in the sounds of the original Nintendo Game Boy and the Commodore 64, while still welcoming a wide range of other hardware under its general umbrella. Still, few chip musicians show up to a gig hauling a PDP-1. That’s perhaps a shame, given that the 1950s era machine can produce beautiful music—as demonstrated by [Peter Samson] and [Joe Lynch].

The video demonstration was recorded at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. [Peter Samson] is operating the PDP-1, which is running the Harmony Compiler—which allows the machine to play four individual voices. This is achieved by taking advantage of the PDP-1’s program flags, which are visible as six light bulbs on the control panel. Instructions can be used to turn these bulbs on and off. The Harmony Compiler works by switching the bulbs on and off fast enough to create audible square waves when the light bulb outputs are wired to a simple audio amplifier.

Using Harmony Compiler, [Joe] and [Peter] worked together to transcribe the song Olson by Boards of Canada to play on the PDP-1. The song is encoded on paper tape, and fed into the machine—which dutifully plays back the hauntingly beautiful melody.

If you’re interested in the code that achieved this, it’s blessedly available via Github. If you love stories about old computers playing music, we’ve got those too. Video after the break.

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Bringing Bluetooth To The Zune

September 27, 2025 by 10 Comments

The Zune might have joined the portable media player game too late to ever really be competition for the iPod, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t pick up some devoted fans along the way. Some of them are still breathing new life into the device, such as [The Director of Legal Evil Emeritus] at the Louisville Hackerspace, with this project that gives it Bluetooth capability.

As far as media players go, there’s still some solid reasons to rock a Zune. Compared to other devices of the era, it offers a better DAC, an FM tuner, and no iTunes reliance. The goal of this project was to bring a bit of modern functionality without having to do any modification of the Zune itself. As the player supported docks with IR remotes, this build involves using an ESP32 to listen to the Bluetooth signal coming from the speakers, interpret any button presses, and forward them along to the Zune’s dock.

There is a dedicated scene for these old music players, but this build is unique for not needing to crack open the case and splice in a Bluetooth module. Even then, those typically don’t have the ability to interact with things like this speaker with its integrated control buttons.

We don’t often seen Zune hacks come our way — the last time Microsoft’s player graced these pages was in 2010, when the Open Zune Development Kit was released.

Thanks to [JAC_101] for the tip!

Give Your Band The Music Of The Bands

September 18, 2025 by 3 Comments

The way to get into radio, and thence electronics, in the middle years of the last century, was to fire up a shortwave receiver and tune across the bands. In the days when every country worth its salt had a shortwave station, Cold War adversaries boomed propaganda across the airwaves, and even radio amateurs used AM that could be listened to on a consumer radio, a session in front of the dial was sure to turn up a few surprises. It’s a lost world in the 21st century, as the Internet has provided an easier worldwide medium and switch-mode power supplies have created a blanket of noise. The sounds of shortwave are thus no longer well known to anyone but a few enthusiasts, but that hasn’t stopped [gnd buzz] investigating their potential in electronic music.

There’s very little on the air which couldn’t be used in some form by the musician, but the samples are best used as the base for further processing. One example takes a “buzzer” signal and turns it into a bass instrument. The page introduces the different types of things which can be found on the bands, for which with the prevalence of WebSDRs there has never been a lower barrier to entry.

If you’re too young to have scanned the bands, a capable receiver can now be had for surprisingly little.

Radio dial header: Maximilian Schönherr, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Rediscovering Microsoft’s Oddball Music Generator From The 1990s

August 14, 2025 by 8 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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A Modern Version Of Famous, Classic Speaker

July 25, 2025 by 12 Comments

Modern musicians may take for granted that a wide array of musical instruments can either be easily connected to a computer or modeled entirely in one, allowing for all kinds of nuanced ways of creating unique sounds and vivid pieces of music without much hardware expense. Not so in the 1930s. Musicians of the time often had to go to great lengths to generate new types of sounds, and one of the most famous of these was the Leslie speaker, known for its unique tremolo and vibrato. Original Leslies could cost thousands now, though, so [Levi Graves] built a modern recreation.

The Leslie speaker itself got its characteristic sound by using two speakers. The top treble speaker was connected to a pair of horns (only one of which produced sound, the other was used for a counterweight) on a rotating platform. The second speaker in the bottom part of the cabinet faced a rotating drum. Both the horns and drum were rotated at a speed chosen by the musician and leading to its unique sound. [Levi] is actually using an original Leslie drum for his recreation but the sound is coming out of a 100-watt “mystery” speaker, with everything packaged neatly into a speaker enclosure. He’s using a single-speed Leslie motor but with a custom-built foot switch can employ more fine-tuned control over the speed that the drum rotates.

Even though modern technology allows us to recreate sounds like this, often the physical manipulation of soundwaves like this created a unique feeling of sound that can’t be replicated in any other way. That’s part of what’s driven the popularity of these speakers throughout the decades, as well as the Hammond organs they’re often paired with. The tone generators on these organs themselves are yet another example of physical hardware providing a unique, classic sound not easily replicated.

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A man is shown performing a wheelie on a red bicycle in a classroom. In the background, a projector is displaying a phone screen running an indistinct app.

An Adaptive Soundtrack For Bike Tricks

June 22, 2025 by 7 Comments

If you’ve put in all the necessary practice to learn bike tricks, you’d probably like an appropriately dramatic soundtrack to accompany your stunts. A team of students working on a capstone project at the University of Washington took this natural desire a step further with the Music Bike, a system that generates adaptive music in response to the bike’s motion.

The Music Bike has a set of sensors controlled by an ESP32-S3 mounted beneath the bike seat. The ESP32 transmits the data it collects over BLE to an Android app, which in turn uses the FMOD Studio adaptive sound engine to generate the music played. An MPU9250 IMU collects most position and motion data, supplemented by a hall effect sensor which tracks wheel speed and direction of rotation.

When the Android app receives sensor data, it performs some processing to detect the bike’s actions, then uses these to control FMOD’s output. The students tried using machine learning to detect bike tricks, but had trouble with latency and accuracy, so they switched to a threshold classifier. They were eventually able to detect jumps, 180-degree spins, forward and reverse motion, and wheelies. FMOD uses this information to modify music pitch, alter instrument layering, and change the track. The students gave an impressive in-class demonstration of the system in the video below (the demonstration begins at 4:30).

Surprisingly enough, this isn’t the first music-producing bike we’ve featured here. We’ve also seen a music-reactive bike lighting system.

Thanks to [Blake Hannaford] for the tip!

When Wireless MIDI Has Latency, A Hardwired Solution Saves The Day

June 7, 2025 by 14 Comments

[Moby Pixel] wanted to build a fun MIDI controller. In the end, he didn’t build it just once, but twice—with the aim of finding out which microcontroller was most fit for this musical purpose. Pitted against each other? The ESP32 and Raspberry Pi Pico.

The MIDI controller itself is quite fetching. It’s built with a 4 x 4 array of arcade buttons to act as triggers for MIDI notes or events. They’re assembled in a nice wooden case with a lovely graphic wrap on it. The buttons themselves are wired to a microcontroller, which is then responsible for sending MIDI data to other devices.

At this point, the project diverges. Originally, [Moby Pixel] set the device up to work with an ESP32 using wireless MIDI over Bluetooth. However, he soon found a problem. Musical performance is all about timing, and the ESP32 setup was struggling with intermittent latency spikes that would ruin the performance. Enter the Raspberry Pi Pico using MIDI over USB. The hardwired solution eliminated the latency problems and made the controller far more satisfying to use.

There may be solutions to the latency issue with the wireless ESP32 setup, be they in code, hardware configuration, or otherwise. But if you want to play with the most accuracy and the minimum fuss, you’ll probably prefer the hardwired setup.

Latency is a vibe killer in music as we’ve explored previously.

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