Bohemian Rhapsody On Old Hardware

April 19, 2009 by Eliot 24 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht96HJ01SE4]

Here’s another junk music performance to add to the list. [bd594] put together this rendition of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody on assorted computing equipment. The lead piano sound is from an Atari 800XL. Lead guitar is a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a. An 8inch floppy plays bass while a HP ScanJet 3C covers the vocals. He had to dub the scanner four times to get all of the vocal parts. He wanted to use four independent scanners but the prices on eBay were forbidding. The use of oscilloscopes to show the wave forms in the video is a nice touch. Check out our post about Radiohead’s Nude for more examples of this.

[via adafruit]

Wiitar, A Build Log

April 17, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

wiitar

[Ozan] sent in this build log from when he made a Wiitar. As you can probably guess from the title, it’s a guitar combined with a wiimote. He has completely gutted the Wiimote and installed the internals in the guitar. Some toggle switches were mounted to control the button states on the Wiimote. This is a pretty useful setup as you can use the Wiimote data to control effects on the guitar. We’ve actually seen a very similar setup before. [Ozan] has included the build log, as well as a simple glovepie script and a sample effect patch.

Hard Drive Speaker IPod Dock

April 14, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 16 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vEEx4rfugE]

This looks like someone watched the Obsolete Technology Band, and had to have one of their own. It appears to be a dock, driving several different sizes of old hard drives. While the concept isn’t new, we thought they did a decent job of putting the whole display together. It could be fun to have that mounted on our wall, waiting for geek friends to impress.

Beat Boxxx And Speak To Me/Breathe

April 14, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

[vimeo=4038918]
[Steve] is in the MFA Design and Technology program at parsons, and as part of his studies, has built a couple really interesting projects. First, the Beat boxxx, as seen in the video above, is an 80’s retro looking portable beat looper. You create and loop your beats at the time of playing using simple hand gestures. The look is great, for those who enjoy cardboard and magic marker, though we think some tonal variation and possibly a wider pitch variation would really make this fun.

His second project is Speak to Me/Breathe. This project was meant to be a commentary on security in our daily information. He is visually displaying the braille symbols to spell out his emails. If any person were to spend the effort, they could decipher his emails. The finish on this project is quite nice, you can see a video of the display after the break.

Continue reading “Beat Boxxx And Speak To Me/Breathe” →

New Driver From RepRap, Singing

April 3, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 20 Comments

stepper

RepRap has released a new driver board for their stepper motors. They’ve honed the design to be easier to assemble and cheaper. We’re sure all of that is wonderful, but what really got our attention was the video. In the video, which you can see after the break, they run a test file through it to make it “sing” happy birthday. Is this something that everybody does and we’re just now catching on? Why all the musical stepper motors today?

Continue reading “New Driver From RepRap, Singing” →

The Ondestrak

January 12, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 8 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9S9SZswOC0]

If you like the sound of the theramin, you may enjoy the Ondestrak. Based loosely off of the Ondes Martnot, the Ondestrak works by changing the pitch of a continuous note. [Devin_mccutchen] built his using an old gametrak controller. The controller looks pretty cool. We hadn’t seen that one before. Check out a more musical performance after the break.

Continue reading “The Ondestrak” →

Passive Multidimensional Input

December 29, 2008 by Nick Caiello 15 Comments

[vimeo 2433260]

Any musician who has ever used a computer to create music will tell you that while this technology is more than capable of producing great music, it is always a much more intimate experience to create by physically playing an instrument. In an effort to bridge this gap, [Randall Jones] has built a passive multidimensional interface that uses multitouch input to create an intimate experience that rivals that of a traditional musical instrument. While this concept may seem very complicated, the interface is made of only copper strips, rubber, and wood. At $50, this interface was designed to be inexpensive and appears to be very easy to use. As seen in the video, this interface can be used as anything from a drum to a multitouch synthesizer.

[via Make]