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!

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