Autonomous Electro-musical Devices

April 27, 2016 by Elliot Williams 5 Comments

Circuit-bending is tons of fun. The basic idea is that you take parts of any old electronic device, say a cheap toy keyboard, and probe all around with wires and resistors, disturbing its normal functioning and hoping to get something cool. And then you make art or music or whatever out of it. But that’s a lot of work. What you really need is a circuit-bending robot!

Or at least that’s what [Gijs Gieskes] needed, when he took apart a horrible Casio SA-5 and grafted on enough automatic glitching circuitry to turn it into a self-playing musical sculpture. It’s random, but somehow it’s musical. It’s great stuff. Check out the video below to see what we mean.

We also love the way the autonomous glitching circuit is just laid over the top of the original circuitboard. It looks like some parasite out of Aliens. But with blinking LEDs.

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The Teensy Audio Library

September 30, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 46 Comments

There are a few ways of playing .WAV files with a microcontroller, but other than that, doing any sort of serious audio processing has required a significantly beefier processor. This isn’t the case anymore: [Paul Stoffregen] has just released his Teensy Audio Library, a library for the ARM Cortex M4 found in the Teensy 3 that does WAV playback and recording, synthesis, analysis, effects, filtering, mixing, and internal signal routing in CD quality audio.

This is an impressive bit of code, made possible only because of the ARM Cortex M4 DSP instructions found in the Teensy 3.1. It won’t run on an 8-bit micro, or even the Cortex M3-based Arduino Due. This is a project meant for the Teensy, although [Paul] has open sourced everything and put it up on Github. There’s also a neat little audio adapter board for the Teensy 3 with a microSD card holder, a 1/8″ jack, and a connector for a microphone.

In addition to audio recording and playback, there’s also a great FFT object that will split your audio spectrum into 512 bins, updated at 86Hz. If you want a sound reactive LED project, there ‘ya go. There’s also a fair bit of synthesis functions for sine, saw, triangle, square, pulse, and arbitrary waveforms, a few effects functions for chorus, flanging, envelope filters, and a GUI audio system design tool that will output code directly to the Arduino IDE for uploading to the Teensy.

It’s really an incredible amount of work, and with the number of features that went into this, we can easily see the quality of homebrew musical instruments increasing drastically over the next few months. This thing has DIY Akai MPC/Monome, psuedo-analog synth, or portable effects box written all over it.

The Mostly 3D Printed Violin

March 26, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

violin

While Thingiverse is filled with Ocarinas, there’s little in the way of printable instruments for more serious musicians. [David Perry] hopes to change this with the F-F-Fiddle, the mostly 3D printed full-size electric violin.

The F-F-Fiddle is an entry for the LulzBot March 3D Printing Challenge to make a functional, 3D printed musical instrument. Already there are a few very, very interesting submissions like this trombone, but [David]’s project is by far the most mechanically complex; unlike the other wind and percussion instruments found in the contest, there are a log of stresses found in a violin, and printing a smooth, curved fingerboard is quite the challenge.

While there are a few non-printed parts, namely the strings, a drill rod used as a truss rod, some awesome looking tuners, and of course the piezo pickups – the majority of this violin, including the bridge, is 3D printed. It’s an amazing piece of work, and after listening to the video (below), sounds pretty good too.

You can grab all the files on Thingiverse and read up on the build at Openfab PDX.

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Disarm: Turning Guns Into A Mechanised Musical Orchestra

September 16, 2013 by James Hobson 45 Comments

[Pedro Reyes] is a visual artist who lives in Mexico City. His most recent project was called ‘Disarm’ – a unique exhibit that combined dismantled weapons with sculpture and technology.

The army in Mexico seizes firearms on a regular basis and they are typically either buried or destroyed. But this time a friend working for the National Crime Prevention Commission thought to ask [Pedro] if he could use them for something. A few hundred non-functional guns later, and [Pedro] has a fully automated mechanical orchestra. The articles don’t go into much information about how it works, but it looks like solenoids are mostly utilized to actuate the various instruments. The entire setup is then controlled by a computer, but there’s not much information on the interface design.

When asked about the project, [Pedro] explained his reasoning: “The beautiful thing about ‘Disarm’ as a project is that it combines music, with sculpture, and at the same time, with technology. This is the redemption of metal that could have taken your life or mine. So they are better as musical instruments.”

Watch the 8 minute documentary on ‘Disarm’ by the Creators Project after the break. The weapon-based orchestra sounds pretty good!

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Hydrocrystallophone Probably Won’t Make You Insane

October 21, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

[Fish] is really proud of his newest creation, the Hydrocrystallophone. This new instrument reminds us of an even more steampunk version of [Benny Franklin]’s glass armonica – an instrument that reportedly plunged the player into a, “dark and melancholy mood.”

The build is based around a 1920s hand-cranked phonograph motor. The phonograph motor spins a wine glass filled with water. The water level (and thus tone produced by the wine glass) is varied by a brass tube inside the glass connected to a hydraulic cylinder. Pushing and pushing on the handle of the hydraulic cylinder causes the water level in the glass to change.

We’ve all seen wine glass music before, but this is the first time we’ve seen it with just one glass. [Fish] is working on modifying the phonograph’s governor to get rid of the effects of 78 RPM on the water. He hasn’t quite mastered his new musical invention yet, but we can’t wait to see what [Fish] is able to play with some practice.

In case you’re keeping track of the musical instruments featured on Hack A Day that fall into the “why didn’t I think of that” bin, The Hydrocrystallophone would be the second such instrument in as many months. It’s a very simple but really ingenious device. Check out the video of the Hydrocrystallophone after the break.

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Building An Optigan-like Instrument

September 13, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

[Olli] sent in his writeup of a musical instrument he made called the Black Deck. [Olli]’s instrument was inspired [Jimi Tenor]’s photophone – a transparent disk attached to a fan and photocell.

A transparent disk is placed on the turntable [Olli] rescued during a dumpster diving expedition. A light shines though the optical disk and is picked up by phototransistors. After writing a program to generate an A minor scale onto a transparency, [Olli] connected his contraption to a stereo and heard his creation speak. To control the individual tracks (or notes) on the disk, [Olli] made a keyboard out of photoelectric switches that control which note is played.

Superficially, [Olli]’s instrument resembles an Optigan. While [Olli]’s instrument is capable of producing waveforms, the Optigan is able to reproduce sampled instruments. That being said, we think [Olli]’s Black Deck would feel comfortable next to the Optigans of Kraftwerk and Devo. Check out the YouTube demo of the Black Deck in action after the break:

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