Zinc-based audio oscillator

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By Collin Cunningham
Posted 2009/01/08 @ 1:54 pm
Category Electronics, Music

Nyle posted this multitrack recording featuring sounds from a homemade Zinc oscillator circuit -

An electronic sound composition is made entirely of sounds produced using zinc negetive resistance audio oscillator circuits. No vacuum tubes or transistors were used to generate the sounds.

Several tracks of the zinc oscillator sounds were recorded one at a time. Some of the sounds were enhanced with the addition of reverb.

The morse code parts were sent in real time by manually keying a J-38 straight key. Yes, I can send that fast with a straight key by using a somewhat unusual technique that I developed.

Interesting research – check out further documentation of his experiments here – SparkBangBuzz [via Matrixsynth]

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3 Responses to Zinc-based audio oscillator

Stephen on January 8th, 2009 at 5:18 pm said:

Although something about “Yes, I can send that fast” strikes me as needlessly smug it’s a cool sound, it’s not for all day listening because you would go crazy but it’s cool as a way of showing zinc osciallators. The morse is quite cute, after writing it down because it was far too fast for me to hear, it sounds like it’s talking about the oscillator itself.

Very meta.

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bill beaty on January 8th, 2009 at 9:43 pm said:

I messed with Nyle’s zinc-crust oscillators and found them very easy to build. But I’ve never seen them discussed in the various forums. Hasn’t anyone else bothered to grab their blowtorch and give a try? His discovery needs lots more publicity!

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Collin Cunningham on January 9th, 2009 at 5:31 am said:

@Stephen – I was curious as to the content of that message as well. Thanks for taking the time to check it out.

@Bill – I’ve seen that sentiment expressed about this project before. Perhaps now we’ll see it gets a bit more attention,, feel free to send us your own results.

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