Take your creations beyond the workshop and onto the stage with diy music instruments! Let us show you how these creations range from simple, basic setups that produce beautiful sounds to more complex projects that require a greater level of engineering knowledge. With these tutorials and examples, we’ll guide you on this journey to make your own musical instrument for experimental, artistic or everyday use – so whether you’re starting out new or a seasoned sound creator, come explore the wonderful world of making your own music.
Inspired by the popular flash-based ToneMatrix melody-sequencer, Andrew decided he wanted a tangible 16×16 LED matrix instrument. Sure, there are premade options but none quite fit the bill – the Bliptronic 5000 just doesn’t have enough lights. All the existing 16×16 equivalents were more money than I wanted to pay: A Tenori-on costs something like […]
CrashSpace hosted a night of hand made music on June 25th 2010. Among the performances was a Concerto for Three MakerBots composed by Frank Capodieci. MakerBots are 3D printers that create objects out of plastic, but in this case the extruder portion was removed and the stepper motors were driven at different speeds to create […]
From ultra-low noise AC power cables to a frequency-calibrated jar of stones, it’s pretty amazing what can be sold in the pursuit of better sound. As it turns out, most of these subtle yet pricey upgrades/enhancements are nothing more than placebo – and hearing is a very subjective thing. Originally presented as part of a […]
Benoît Maubrey’s DIE AUDIO GRUPPE perform wearing/using “Audio Tutus” driven by hand-mounted light-to-frequency converters – Basically these are electro-acoustic clothes and dresses (equipped with amplifiers and loudspeakers) that make sounds by interacting thematically and acoustically with their environment. For example the AUDIO BALLERINAS use — among other electronic instruments– light sensors that enable them to […]
Scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider have put together a sound library consisting of Community Commons music interpreted from from LHC datasets. Here’s an example description: The ATLAS detector viewed from the direction of the beam is circular, allowing us to sweep around it in a clockwise direction, looking for tracks and energy deposited […]
When you first turn the POSC on, the LED will light for a fraction of a second. If you’ve got it hooked up to an amplifier, it’ll also squawk for a second. Playing it is as easy as licking your finger and tapping, rubbing, pressing, or smearing it across the two contacts. The amount of incident light on the photoresistor controls the frequency, so experiment with playing it under different lighting conditions. Jim and Kat have produced a bunch of software for digital post-processing of the POSC signal. For mroe info, see the Sonodrome website.
Evan Merz’s album Black Allegheny was arranged by the behavior of many AI ‘agents’ functioning within a bit of Java-based software – In Becoming, I directly borrow Cage’s gamut and graph concepts; however, the software assembles music using concepts from the AI subfield of swarm intelligence. I place a number of agents on the graph […]
