music

462 Articles

Funkytown Performed By Old Hardware

July 13, 2008 by 8 Comments


Inspired by [James Houston]’s remix of Radiohead’s Nude on obsolete hardware, [bd594] put together this mix of Lipps Inc.’s Funkytown. No sampling was used, but he had to loop the footage of the Avaya dot matrix printer’s drum part because it shook the table too much. The guitar and bass line are performed by a Commodore 64. An Intel 14.4 external modem uses DTMF tones for the first part of of the lead and a TI-99/4A beeps out the rest. The TI is also used as a speech synthesizer and a Maxtor harddrive plays the the vocal track.

[via Matrixsynth]

Music And Visual Arts At The Last HOPE

July 12, 2008 by 3 Comments

[Peter Kirn] from Create Digital Music has an article up highlighting many of the great music and visual performance pieces planned for The Last HOPE on Friday night. If you are around New York and not accustomed to hacking conferences, this could be a great excuse to go check it out. Here are some of our favorite projects.

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Radiohead Makes Entire Video With Friggin’ Lasers

July 11, 2008 by 3 Comments


[Radiohead], being no strangers to out of the box delivery ideas, are preparing to release a new video that was created without the use of cameras. The entire video for the song House of Cards was “filmed” using lasers.

The system, known as Geometric Informatics and Velodyne Lidar, scanned the entire environment 900 times a minute to capture an entire party in real time.

The video was originally set to be released in mid July, but appears to have been moved back.

Dancing Wall-E And Rhythmic Synth

July 10, 2008 by 9 Comments


Whether you loved, hated, or didn’t see Wall-E, it’s hard not to fall in love with the iDance Wall-E toy. Connect him to an audio source and Wall-E will dance around like an epileptic Billy Bass.

[Gian Pablo Villamil] at NYC Resistor wondered whether it would work with his custom made Rhythmic Synth, and to his and our delight, it does! The Rhythmic Synth is an older project of his; it is a simple rhythm generator with 4 pitch knobs, 4 modulation knobs, and 4 phase switches. The case was taken from an old external Iomega CD-ROM drive.

Getting the Wall-E to dance isn’t much of a feat, but something about the dancing combined with a synth with embedded lights just screams robot dance party, and that can never be wrong. We’d love to see the Wall-E dancing to a cleaner, more complete synth: maybe this one. Check out Wall-E busting a move after the break.

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Optical DJ Controller

July 10, 2008 by 5 Comments


[Adrian] sent in this sweet little optical DJ controller. The ‘turntable’ was made from a CD and an encoder wheel created with a laser printed transparent overhead sheet. You can score some optical gear from a spare mouse, or just buy the parts. A PIC18F452 encodes everything into a midi signal. You can find a good photo of the schematics here. And you can hit the demo video after the break.

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Aurora Open Source Hardware Mixer

July 8, 2008 by 11 Comments


We’ve seen some fairly impressive mixer projects this year, and the Aurora mixer is no exception. It is a dual channel USB-powered mixer with two linear faders, one crossfader, eight backlit buttons and 24 potentiometers, all built around a PIC 18LF4525 microcontroller. That’s all pretty typical for a mixer, but this one is very visually attractive, featuring a clean and stylish form factor and controllable lighting both under the board and in the LEDs backlighting the buttons and knobs.

Whether you want to buy one now or build one yourself, the Aurora team has made both possible. You can contact them for pricing if you are ready to buy. If you prefer to build, this is an open source project with full assembly instructions, schematics, drivers, patches and all other source code and information you should need available here. See more photos of the Aurora mixer here, or see it in action after the break.

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