Monday, July 29, 2013

Expert: Keith McMillen

Keith McMillen is a contemporary music instrument interface designer.  His designs feature bright, colored LEDs and soft, pressure-sensitive controllers. 

You can find an extensive bio him on his company's staff page.  His work resonates especially well with DIYDSP because of his concise goal statement:

"how to play live interactive music in an ensemble using extended instruments moderated by computer intelligence"

DIYDSP has the same goals, except that we are focused on creating the entire music instrument.  The work on Keith's website focuses on instrument controllers. Perhaps soon, some collaborations will be possible.  Keith's interfaces are based on standard protocols like USB and MIDI interfaces, so the compatibility is possible.  




 "If anyone walks the line between Steve Jobs and Bob Moog, it's Keith McMillen." - H. Haynes"



Monday, July 22, 2013

Ukelele in Carbon Fiber - Music Instrument Design



Design and Manufacture of a Carbon Fiber Ukelele



 


This video shows some amazing details in step-by-step for making small instruments out of carbon fiber!  You can do this at home with the right kind of glue and scissors!  If you don't believe, see the video below the bonus video.

And here is a second bonus video!

The Carbon Fiber Ukelele Project







Carbon Fiber Part Making Example/Demo/How-To

See!  I promised I'd show you a video that shows you how to make your own carbon fiber parts.




Monday, July 15, 2013

Envelope Follower Arduino



btw, get parts you need to do this kind of stuff at DIYDSP Kits and Parts store!

 

The song by Queen!



 

See Envelope Detector voltages in Numeric Form

Narrator, science fair project
LCD Oscilloscope



 

See Enevelope Detector on an Oscilloscope!

narrator
Clap test
Voice detection module





Random Chiptunes Loop





Smooth Jazz! 


iphone connected to microphone connected to Arduino connected to Processing


 







btw, get parts you need to do this kind of stuff at DIYDSP Kits and Parts store!




Thursday, July 4, 2013

Single Line C Digital Music Instruments

This One-Line Music Program in C started off the small craze:


A large number of interesting variations percolated in one place.  I put a few into a CERB40 and can play them as if they were an octave-wide instrument through a pressure-sensors.    No time for a video right now, but if you had been at AtParty2013, you would have seen it.

A world of brief, tingling 8-bit songs

People on this blog in particular  >>> Counter Complex Blog <<< really acted inspired, writing additional one-line songs just by tweaking the algorithm a number of different ways and listening until it sounded good.  I was able to type up some of them and put them into an STM32F4 processor, but more about that later :)

The author returned with a second, delicious-sounding one-line C program which I eventually turned into a music instrument:

A Smartphone App

The speed of the world shocked me when I discovered nowadays, you can buy a smartphone app that lets you type in formulas and hear the results and even play them out through the screen on your cell phone.  I would love to rig that up to some larger, more formal instrument.



Repeating it with an Arduino

Nowadays, you can do this kind of thing with an Arduino:

Although I saw if you're going to go that right, get a quality CPU, like the Leaflabs Maple or Maple Mini:


The Maple -- STM32 ARM Cortex version of Arduino



While we're on topic of Arduino Instruments, here's another cool one, using a real keyboard:



Recalling Ancient Wisdom

One of the posters on that forum included this link in particular, which I found extremely interesting because it contains a curated set of ethereal sound programs just waiting to be unleashed:




Algorithmic Music Synthesis

To me, the original inventor of the DSP Music Box is Ethan Bordeaux. 
  • Since his work in the 1990s, creating a DSP Music Box is still a rare and special thing....    Although, somehow, there is an actual lecture on it.  Who knew!