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Music Archive: Music

February 8, 2010

Bending with Casper Electronics

Pete Edwards does a bit of toy-megaphone turbo bending in this music video montage shot at the Casper Electronics lab. Dang - this makes me think I should start soldering to music myself!

February 5, 2010

Egg Ocarina

There has been no shortage of food-based instruments around here, however I particularly like this one that Youtube user heita3 made from an egg shell. It's a good reminder that pretty much any old thing can be made into a fun project! [Thanks, Nancy!]

More:

Ranjit Bhatnagar's Instrument-a-day

In the thing-a-day tradition for the month of February, Ranjit Bhatnagar is making one musical instrument each day, and documenting them on his blog. Some are electronic, and some are mechanical. It's going to be a good month! Pictured above is the monomarx (top) and remote interference (bottom).

How vinyl records are made

For the last couple of years there has been a resurgence in popularity of vinyl records. Largely due to digital downloads rending the portability of compact discs obsolete, people are starting to gravitate to vinyl as the physical format of choice. In this short documentary from Nick Cavalier we get a behind-the-scenes look at the production of vinyl records at Gotta Groove Records, a new vinyl pressing plant in Cleveland, Ohio.

February 4, 2010

Chiptune Marching Band and Maker Faire Newscastle

I just got back from an awesome Dorkbot DC meeting, with two very inspiring artists' presentations, one by Andy Holtin, and one by Atau Tanaka. While the presentations themselves were fascinating, beyond that, one thing that struck me was the two presenters' associations with Maker Faire and how the Faires are a great incubator of ideas and projects that go on to have lives beyond these single events.

We met Andy originally through Maker Faire Austin, when he was teaching at UT and put together a student art show for us. Atau teaches at Newscastle University, and is the Digital Media Chair of the Culture Lab there. When he and the Culture Lab heard that Maker Faire was coming to town, they knew they wanted to do something special. They put together a workshop and collaborative music performance piece called the Chiptune Marching Band. It was a great success at the Faire and they've now gone on to do it at six different festivals and events (and plan to continue). It's a perfect example of taking a simple, clever electronics circuit (it uses two LM386 chips, one to oscillate, one to amplify) and some crafting supplies, cobbling them all together in the context of an educational and social event, and then immediately turning the objects-made into a fun performance piece, a maker's marching band. All sorts of win!

Above is a video of the Chiptune Marching Band (which we've covered here before) -- the Chiptune Marching Band even has a website.

I look forward to seeing what innovative, wondrous, and wacky things sprout from the heads and hands at this year's Newscastle Faire... and all of the US Faires.

Maker Faire, Newcastle

February 3, 2010

Control your iPhone using an Arduino

Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool:

When we last covered recotana's Open Sound Controller (OSC) library for Arduino (ardOSC), he had an Arduino talking to an iPhone using the OSC protocol. The project worked quite well, however you had to manually connect the two together by specifying their IP address. Now, by adding an implementation of Bonjour, the Arduino can link up to the iPhone automagically, allowing one to easily get on with their mixing.

February 2, 2010

All radio united under autotune

Tim O'Reilly points out this hypnotic demonstration by Lucky Dragons - "PEACE ON EARTH" brings all radio stations together via frequency modulation -

two radios with home-made autotune on every signal received. every station is in tune with every other station. even static is in tune. peace on earth.

If current trends are any indication, mainstream radio will soon sound similar to this without modification (zing!)

Related:
Lucky Dragons' homemade sound device

January 29, 2010

Sharpsicord like a giant music box

Henry Dagg made this giant metallic instrument, called the sharpsicord. A combination of music box and harp, you can program sounds into it by sticking pins into a giant metal drum. When the crank is turned, the barrels spins, and the pins cause individual strings to play. [via neatorama]

January 28, 2010

One-string, one-HDD musical instrument

The Multichord musical instrument is an acoustic stringed instrument with a single string, constructed from wood, a hard drive, 20-lb monofilament, and assorted electronic components. It was the culmination of a project to build an acoustic instrument capable of playing multiple notes without fretting or manual, time-consuming retuning. The Multichord achieves this by attaching a hard drive read/write head assembly between the resonant string and a tensioning spring to adjust the tension of the instrument's string. Careful adjustment was made to the tension of both the string and the spring with the hard drive head in a neutral, unpowered position to ensure a bipolar application of voltage within the safety ratings of the hard drive's coil could cause the string to cover a full musical octave. In the end, the Multichord was tuned to a C-major scale (no flats or sharps) running from A at 220Hz through (but not including) A at 440Hz.

[via Hack a Day]

More:

Atari punk guitar pedal

GetLoFi shares an interesting method for controlling the popular Atari Punk Console circuit via guitar -

The basic idea of this mod is that you are using the volume potentiometer to control the frequency of the APC. Obviously this is not the same as turning the notes played on the guitar fretboard into the APC oscillations, however it is a pretty good way to control your APC remotely. Note that this will not work with a guitar that has an active pre-amp, it has to be the analog un-powered version and obviously it has to be the first in the chain of pedals.

Check out GetLoFi for more details on implementing the Atari Punk Pedal Modification.

In the Maker Shed:

Atari Punk Console Kit

How-To: Amplify your gamer guitar

Randy Sarafan made a cigar box style guitar from an old NES, and shows us how to add a pickup to amplify the sound in his Instructable. He uses a NES controller cable for the audio, so classy!

January 27, 2010

MIDI-controlled circuit bending interface

Daniel Park describes his approach to controlling circuit bent Alesis QSR Quadrasynth through MIDI data, simplifying control for musicians -

With this design I wanted the entire bent interface under MIDI control. Any MIDI source: MIDI cc’s, program changes, tempo synch, MIDI machine commands, notation can be routed to any destination on the circuit bent interface via sysex programming.
[…]
The circuit bent interface features two patch bays on a bank of rotary switches. One patch bay is 10 points dedicated to the effects processor bends while the other patch bay is 24 points dedicated to the oscillator bends. With rotaries you can get creative and efficient. No more massive amounts of drilling for point to point patch bays.

A bit more explanation can be found over at GetLoFi.

Arduino & BlinkM music visualizer

This music visualizer project combines two of my favorite things, Arduino's & BlinkM's, with another one of my favorite things, music! In the video above, all the BlinkM's are mapped to display the same value, but they can be controlled individually with some modifications. Check out the link for complete build instructions and the Arduino source code. [via arduino.cc]

This project demonstrates using an Arduino, a LM386N opamp circuit and multiple BlinkM LED units to create an audio visualization device. The audio is not pass-through so it requires a dedicated mono input. In the video demo, the Arduino enclosure is connected to the tape-out of a DX052 mixer and powered by USB by my previous DX052 power hack.

In the Maker Shed:

The Maker Shed has Arduino's and BlinkM's!

January 26, 2010

Trimpin film in SF and San Rafael

Trimpin in his studio, with his kinetic sculpture "SHHH." Photo (c) by Susanna Howe/Corbis

In response to my posting about Trimpin: The Sound of Invention, the sweet-looking documentary about engineer, inventor, and sound artist, Trimpin, the PR folks for the film emailed to let us know that it will be showing in San Francisco and San Rafael, starting this Friday. Here are the show dates, times, and locations:

Red Vic Movie House
Friday, January 29 - Sunday, January 31, 2010
Fri: 7:15pm, 9:15pm; Sat & Sun: 2:00pm, 4:00pm, 7:15pm, 9:15pm
1727 Haight Street San Francisco, CA 94117
Tickets here

Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center
Wednesday, February 3 and Thursday, February 4, 2010
6:45pm and 9:00pm, both nights
1118 Fourth St., San Rafael, CA 94912 (415) 454-1222
Tickets here

If you go to see the film, let us know what you thought in the comments.

More:
Trimpin documentary: The Sound of Invention

January 25, 2010

Trimpin documentary: The Sound of Invention

Here are three trailers (two more after the jump) for Trimpin: The Sound of Invention, a documentary film about engineer, sound artist, and inventor, Trimpin. The film is currently making its way around the festival circuit. Has anyone here seen it? It looks awesome. [Thanks, Patrick Reilly!]

Engineering Paradise

When thinking up a way to promote the awesomeness of engineering, IBM Fellow John Cohn did what came naturally - a music video parody of a Coolio track, of course! [via Adafruit Industries]

The Nebulophone Arduino-based stylus synth

Yet still another sweet piece of kit debuted at Austin's monthly Handmade Music event - the Nebulophone from Bleep Labs incorporates a digital synth running on Arduino compatible hardware with a stylophone-like PCB keyboard. Additional features include a light-controlled analog filter, LFO, and IR-synced arpeggiator - want want! Code + schematics can be found over at Bleep Labs.

Nokia N900 running Android

Mobile hacker Brandon Roberts has managed to shoehorn Android onto his N900 along with the Maemo 5 OS for a dual boot setup. [via livbit]

January 22, 2010

Confusing Casio keyboard connections clarified

When recently asked to help make sense of an unintuitive keybed design (from a Casio CTK-510) - I quickly recalled my own frustrated attempts to repurpose a similar assembly. Though I never did fully 'get' the logic of that key matrix, I was really just surprised there were no example analysis to be found on the Google. Luckily, a couple years later, that status has changed after coming across Highly Liquid's primer on basic keyboard matrices. Good stuff that'll likely come in handy for hackers/benders/synth-DIYers out there.

January 21, 2010