The Nonsense Factory
The Maywa Denki collective makes instruments of mass whims.
Music
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.
Birds play guitar
Artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s installation features the avant-noise stylings of the seemingly mild-mannered zebra finch – For his installation in The Curve, Boursier-Mougenot creates a walk-though aviary for a flock of zebra finches, furnished with electric guitars and other musical instruments. As the birds go about their routine activities, perching on or feeding from the various […]
Linux-powered digital guitar with touch screen interface
Adam writes to us from Melbourne, Australia: This is seriously cool, open source, too (running Gentoo). Basically it’s a MIDI controller, built into a guitar, with a pressure-sensitive touch screen. Misa
Lindy bomb in style with restored radio
Radio hacker and swing dancer Greg Charvot is at it again with his latest restoration, the Retro Boom Box. His local swing group was in need of a portable radio to use for impromptu Lindy Hopping, so he outfitted a 1940’s radio with modern batteries that they could use while on the run.
Cracking ice sheet sounds like blaster battle
This recording was made and posted by German composer Andreas Bick at a frozen lake in the Berlin area over the winter of 2005. He explains:
Underwater microphones proved especially well-suited for these recordings: in a small hole drilled close beneath the surface of the water, the sounds emitted by the body of ice carry particularly well. The most striking thing about these recordings is the synthetic-sounding descending tones caused by the phenomenon of the dispersion of sound waves. The high frequencies of the popping and cracking noises are transmitted faster by the ice than the deeper frequencies, which reach the listener with a time lag as glissandi sinking to almost bottomless depths.
[via Boing Boing]
Bassdll, a sound library for Arduino
Drew Crawford made this excellent-sounding piezo speaker sound library for the Arduino. A demonstration of the library in action starts at 3 minutes into the above video, and the library can be downloaded from his code repository.
Bending the Kaossilator
GetLoFi posted this demo of a hacked Korg Kaossilator with a variable clock, resulting in some sweet time/pitch stretches – Sometimes newer devices get overlooked for purposes of circuit bending. Two main reasons are price and abundant use of SMT components almost too small to work on. The Kaosillator is one such device. However once […]
