In 1958 the BBC established the Radiophonic Workshop to explore and produce innovative sounds for radio programming. The group’s unconventional approach to sound synthesis and arrangement poised them at the forefront of music technology – making them the envy of many pioneering musicians. Looking back at some of their hardware setups, it’s no wonder current-day […]
Anonymous writes – I was real interested in music theory and how to computationally create something aurally pleasing. Though the square waves may not be aurally pleasing (for most), I was able to make a PIC-based organ that played random chord progressions. The resulting cardboard music box makes sings a pretty sweet tune – dig […]
Purported to be the fourth major electronic component, HP is introducing the memristor – The new component is called the “memristor” — a word blend of “memory” and “resistor”. The physical working model and the mathematical model of the component were presented side by side in a paper in the journal Nature, yesterday. Four researchers […]
From the MAKE Flickr photo pool Wow – Holotone grafted a toy phone circuit to an old PC gaming joystick and added onboard speaker, touch contacts, photocell/LED control, pitch control and more! – thus the Tiny Optotouch is born. The joystick itself is just two potentiometers, so I use them as switchable pitch adjustment on […]
The Noise Toy kit by Loud Objects is an easy build that delivers some impressive bit-bleeping goodness. After some simple soldering, you’ve got an excellent little synth-noise generator that can double as a programmable experimenter’s board – great for those interested in microcontroller sound synthesis. Next week, we’ll go into more detail regarding such programming […]
Beamer writes – I’ve been working on a sequencer project for a while and I got some good footage of my good friend Scott Hansen from Tycho and ISO50 playing with it. It’s based off of the Arduino right now. The first row is your standard note assignment The second row is velocity (turned off […]
Lorin Parker has created a unique vocal synthesizer using a microcontroller, basic principles of analog and digital synthesis and an integrated “Speakjet” chip. The source code is open source, and schematics, hardware plans and kits will be posted soon too – Link. [Link updated, thanks Sam! -cc]
