Axoloti - Embed A Digital Modular Synth In Your Instrument

This is very special to me.  This is exactly what I have been looking to do with the digital music instruments I have been designing and building - Give them a modular synthesizer editor.

This is a software and a hardware project.  It lets you graphically edit a patch for a DSP-based music instrument, then upload it into a small circuit board.  That means you can put that instrument into a box with sensors and controls, make a digital guitar, tune it to sound just the way you like it and even put all kinds of digital effects on it!  It's a very difficult and important project and I am sure it will lead to very many interesting kinds of new instruments, songs, performances and possibly even genres of art!

Here are the specs:

• Two 1/4" jacks
• Stereo headphone output
• MIDI Input
• STM32F4 processor (168 MHz w/ FPU)
• USB
• Modular synth editor on Desktop
• Cross-Platform support (Lin/Win/OSX)
• Approximately $100 incl. shipping

I highly recommend supporting Axiloti on Indiegogo.  I look forward to working with it a lot in 2015!

New Playlist For Electric Eel Christmas Carols

 My new playlist: Electric Eel Christmas Carols

Subscribe to find out when new songs are added on my upcoming trip to Germany!

This is me playing traditional Christmas Carols like Silent Night, Joy to the World, etc., on an instrument I designed while at the MIT Media Lab.  It's called the Electric Eel.  I designed it because I was stuck between the two worlds of electronic and acoustic music.  I like the sounds of electronic music, but I also like the spontaneous, collaborative, nature of acoustic music.  So I designed this instrument which responds to the intensity of sliding the belt up and down by generating more power to emphasize notes.  If you're really curious, check out my wiki Exertion Music where I show how to design and build your own.

Compiling the Bitbox for the STM32F4 Under Lubuntu 13.10

If you didn't know, the Bitbox is an excellent, efficient graphics and audio project for the stm32f4 microcontroller.

In a small package you get VGA out, Micro SD Card, USB Keyboard and Controllers in, and headphone out.

Over on DIYDSP.com, I give step-by-step instructions for compiling it under Lubuntu 13.10.

.MOD music player ported to BitBox

If you're not familar with .mod  format, you should read up on it, because they're an efficient way to store music.  Instead of recording a full waveform, like mp3/aac, they store a number of short samples and a score file for the music.

Having mod-playing code on a platform is extremely useful because it allows that platform to play songs with very limited resources - which is often the case in embedded environments where DSP is most useful. 

The Bitbox itself is a DIY video game console based on the excellent stm32f4 processor.  So, having the mod player there is valuable because it will let you add music to your video games without having much memory and disk space.  Speaking of disk space, this release of the mod player is extra great because it can play the mod files directly from an SD card!  So, check it out!

Dan A. Designs a great-sounding IIR filter on the FV-1 DSP