MeggySynth makes music

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By Collin Cunningham
Posted 2009/02/26 @ 4:30 am
Category Electronics, General, Music

Move over Tenori-On – dariusk is writing a music synthesizer program (among other things) for the Meggy Jr. RGB kit -

This is my first run of a little live performance sound and video device I’m calling MeggySynth. It’s definitely just a proof of concept, I’m hoping to make things more impressive all around. I’ll be using the A/B buttons for pitch shifting, too.

Again, sorry about the disappearing pixels, it’s the aliasing from the refresh rates of the Meggy and my camera. Any suggestions on how I might fix that?

To record properly, the LED flashing speed will have to be slower than the video’s framerate – likely 30fps. Hmmm … with all the homebrew music apps for Nintendo DS and PSP, there’s likely to be more sound-making sketches for Meggy in the future.

In the Maker Shed

Cube 3D Printer

Calculator Kit from Spikenzie Labs

Telegraph Decoder Kit by Spikenzie Labs

MAKE Rovera 4WD Arduino Robot Kit

4 Responses to MeggySynth makes music

gzaloprgm on February 26th, 2009 at 6:26 am said:

Music is *ok*, but I think it sounds too squarish. If you have any extra GPIO you might try implementing a passive dac and it will sound A LOT much better.

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Darius K. on February 26th, 2009 at 7:15 am said:

I get those problems even when display non-flashing LEDs. The problem is that the refresh rate of the LED is less than 2x the refresh rate of the camera. Basic aliasing/Nyquist stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquistâ€“Shannon_sampling_theorem

Also, gzaloprgm: part of the fun is that this is working off of a vanilla Meggy Jr RGB. Although wait until you see what I have coming next

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RocketGuy on February 26th, 2009 at 7:38 am said:

Another solution to the flicker issue with the camera is to manually set the shutter speed to a slower speed, if you have shutter or aperture priority modes. Closing down the aperture will also lengthen the shutter speed, and might help(if you can’t set it directly).

You can also reduce the frame rate, but I dunno if that will actually fix the sync issue, as the shutter could still be too fast.

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Jo on February 28th, 2009 at 7:53 pm said:

You’re ready to start writing Philip Glass quality music.

*ducks*

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