In the Maker Shed: MidiVox shield for Arduino

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By Collin Cunningham
Posted 2010/03/17 @ 6:04 am
Category Arduino, General, Tools

The MidiVox shield turns a basic Arduino board into a standalone MIDI synthesizer with parameters tweakable via MIDI CC messages. Hook up a MIDI keyboard controller via the onboard 5-pin DIN (aka MIDI) jack, upload a sketch and play. You may be surprised what sweet sounds can be generated by a single channel of 12-bit digital-to-analog conversion (I definitely was).

A test drive of the kit’s example sketch can be seen synthing just below this sentence …

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9 Responses to In the Maker Shed: MidiVox shield for Arduino

Angry Man on March 17th, 2010 at 10:15 am said:

Does it only play sharps and flats? Why is he only playing those keys?

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- Collin Cunningham on March 17th, 2010 at 12:10 pm said:
  
  Because those are easiest keys to improvise on, while remaining enjoyable to listen to
  
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- Matt Mets on March 17th, 2010 at 12:35 pm said:
  
  The black keys happen to form a pentatonic scale, which is a set of notes that generally sound good no matter which order you play them in. You could do the same thing using any set of keys that make a pentatonic scale, but the black keys are especially nice because they are separated from the rest of the keys, so they don’t take much work to play
  
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  Collin Cunningham on March 17th, 2010 at 4:01 pm said:
  
  yeah – what he said!
  
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  rush rules 2112 on May 29th, 2012 at 10:36 pm said:
  
  you got me into electronoics mr. cunningham . soon afte I wached your videos I started working on arduino, computors and, breadbord electonics. I am only 12 years old and I now can build cool thing in my room. soon I am going to build a arduino collor orgon inspired by you. thank you for your videos and your time.
  
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pichenettes on March 21st, 2010 at 11:37 am said:

I am curious as to why you used a DAC instead of PWM + active low-pass filter. Did you really care about those extra 4 bits of resolution?

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Collin Cunningham on March 21st, 2010 at 8:19 pm said:

Yup, those extra 4 bits can add quite a bit more detail.
Plus I imagine the filter necessary for the Arduino’s standard PWM signal(@~490Hz) would muddy things up quite a bit

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Jowa Moo on August 25th, 2011 at 5:58 pm said:

Cool stuff!
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David B. Lection on May 16th, 2012 at 8:35 am said:

Is this shield still available?

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