The Luminiferous Theremin

August 9, 2024 by Al Williams 5 Comments

[Extreme Kits] asks the question: “What the hell is a luminiferous theremin?” We have to admit, we know what a thermin is, but that’s as far as we got. You’ve surely seen and heard a theremin, the musical instrument developed by Leon Theremin that makes swoopy music often associated with science fiction movies. The luminiferous variation is a similar instrument that uses modern time of flight sensors to pick up your hand positions.

The traditional instrument uses coils, and your hands alter the frequency of oscillators. Some versions use light sensors to avoid the problems associated with coils. While the time of flight sensors also use light, they are immune to many false readings caused by stray light.

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MIDI Controller In A Cubic Inch

July 27, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 3 Comments

MIDI as a standard has opened up a huge world to any musician willing to use a computer to generate or enhance their playing and recording. Since the 80s, it has it has revolutionized the way music is produced and performed, allowing for seamless integration of digital instruments, automation of complex sequences, and unprecedented control over everything from production to editing. It has also resulted in a number of musical instruments that probably wouldn’t be possible without electronic help, like this MIDI instrument which might be the world’s smallest.

Fitting into a cubic inch of space, the tiny instrument’s volume is mostly taken up by the MIDI connector itself which was perhaps an acceptable size by 1980s standards but seems rather bulky today. A two-layer PCB split into three sections sandwiches the connector in place and boasts an ATtiny85 microcontroller and all the associated electronics needed to implement MIDI. Small threaded screws hold the platform together and provide each layer with a common ground. Four small pushbuttons at the top of the device act as the instrument’s keys.

The project’s creator (and Hackaday alum!) [Jeremy Cook] has it set up to play notes from a piano right now, but has also made the source code available so that any musical action can be programmed onto these buttons. Flexibility is perhaps MIDI’s greatest strength and why the standard has lasted for decades now, as it makes it fairly straightforward to build more comprehensive, easy-to-learn musical instruments or even musical instruments out of retro video game systems.

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A tuna fish with several probes sticking out of it.

So You Can Tuna Fish

July 19, 2024 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

You know what they say. But it’s 2024, after all. Shouldn’t you be able to tune a fish by now? As [ChromaLock] shows us in the video below, it’s absolutely possible, and has been all along.

Of course, you can’t possibly put a rainbow trout (or any other fish) under tension until it produces audible tones. So, how does it work? [ChromaLock] turned to the skin, which functions electrically much like ours does with different resistance values in different areas.

From there, it was a matter of hunting around for spots that produced different notes that sounded good, and marking them for later so it can be played like a potentiometer. But there were problems with this setup, mostly screeching between notes from stray voltages in the environment.

After a brief detour using a PS/2 keyboard with spray-painted keycaps, [ChromaLock] said to hell with it and unearthed a regular MIDI keyboard. Armed with a 3D printed jig to hold the probes, [ChromaLock] tested everything with a cucumber, and then out came the trout for its musical debut. Be sure to check it out after the break.

What else can you do with canned tuna and other fish? Cook up some pyrolized bread, and you’ve got yourself a foundry and crucible.

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Swapping Vinyl For Cardboard With This ESP32 Turntable

June 30, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 15 Comments

Cardboard is a surprisingly durable material, especially in its corrugated form. It’s extremely lightweight for its strength, is easy to work, can be folded and formed into almost any shape, is incredibly inexpensive, and when it has done its duty it can be recycled back into more paper. For these reasons, it’s often used in packaging material but it can be used to build all kinds of things outside of ensuring that products arrive at their locations safely. This working cardboard record player is one example.

While the turntable doesn’t have working records in the sense that the music is etched into them like vinyl, each has its own RFID chip embedded that allows the ESP32 in the turntable’s body to identify them. Each record corresponds to a song stored on an SD card that instructs the ESP32 to play the appropriate song. It also takes care of spinning the record itself with a small stepper motor. There are a few other details on this build that tie it together too, including a movable needle arm held on with a magnet and a volume slider.

As far as a building material goes, cardboard is fairly underrated in our opinion. Besides small projects like this turntable, we’ve also seen it work as the foundation for a computer, and it even has the strength and durability to be built into a wall or even used as shelving material. And, of course, it’s a great material to use when prototyping new designs.

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2024 Business Card Challenge: Tiny MIDI Keyboard

June 6, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 17 Comments

The progress for electronics over the past seven decades or so has always trended towards smaller or more dense components. Moore’s Law is the famous example of this, but even when we’re not talking about transistors specifically, technology tends to get either more power efficient or smaller. This MIDI keyboard, for example, is small enough that it will fit in the space of a standard business card which would have been an impossibility with the technology available when MIDI first became standardized, and as such is the latest entry in our Business Card Challenge.

[Alana] originally built this tiny musical instrument to always have a keyboard available on the go, and the amount of features packed into this tiny board definitely fits that design goal. It has 18 keys with additional buttons to change the octave and volume, and has additional support for sustain and modulation as well. The buttons and diodes are multiplexed in order to fit the IO for the microcontroller, a Seeed Studio Xiao SAMD21, and it also meets the USB-C standards so it will work with essentially any modern computer available including most smartphones and tablets so [Alana] can easily interface it with Finale, a popular music notation software.

Additionally, the project’s GitHub page has much more detail including all of the Arduino code needed to build a MIDI controller like this one. This particular project has perhaps the best size-to-usefulness ratio we’ve seen for compact MIDI controllers thanks to the USB-C and extremely small components used on the PCB, although the Starshine controller or these high-resolution controllers are also worth investigating if you’re in the market for compact MIDI devices like this one.

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A small internet radio in 3D-printed case with a knob and an OLED screen.

GlobeTune Will Widen Your Musical Horizons

June 1, 2024 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

Are you tired of the same old music, but can’t afford any new tunes, even if they’re on dead formats? Boy, do we know that feeling. Here’s what you do: build yourself a GlobeTune music player, and you’ll never want for new music again.

The idea is simple, really. Just turn what we assume is a nice, clicky knob, and after a bit of static (which is a great touch!), you get a new, random radio station from somewhere around the globe. [Alexis D.] originally built this as a way to listen to and discover new music while disconnecting from the digital world, and we think it’s a great idea.

[Alexis D.] has production in mind, so after a Raspberry Pi Zero W prototype, they set about redesigning it around the ESP32. The current status seems to be hardware complete, software forthcoming. [Alexis D.] says that a crowdfunding campaign is in the works, but that the project will be open-sourced once in an acceptable state. So stay tuned!

Speaking of dead-ish formats, here’s an Internet radio in a cassette form factor.

Nature Vs Nurture In Beethoven’s Genome

May 17, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 19 Comments

When it comes to famous musicians, Beethoven is likely to hit most top ten charts. Researchers recently peered into his genome to see if they could predict his talent by DNA alone.

Using a previously-identified polygenetic index (PGI) for musical talent, which finds the propensity of certain genes to influence a given trait after a genome-wide association study (GWAS), the researchers were able to compare samples of Beethoven’s DNA to that of two separate population studies with known musical achievement data.

Much to the relief of those who saw Gattaca as a cautionary tale, the scientists found that Beethoven scored only around the tenth percentile for the ability to keep a beat according to his genetic markers. According to the researchers, using genetic markers to predict abilities of an individual can lead to incorrect conclusions, despite their usefulness for group level analyses.

Curious about more musical science? How about reconstructing “Another Brick in The Wall (Part I)” from brainwaves or building a Square Laser Harp?