Category Archives: audio synthesis

The Swiss Army Knife of Audio Synthesis

Posted on by

Thirty years ago, we would be lucky if a computer could play audio. Take a computer from twenty years ago, and you’ll be lucky if it can play an MP3 in real-time. Now, computers can handle hundreds of tracks of CD-quality audio, and microcontrollers are several times more powerful than a desktop computer of the mid-90s. This means, of course, that microcontrollers can do audio very, very well. For his entry to the Hackaday Prize, [Fabien] is capitalizing on this power to create a Swiss Army knife of audio synthesis. It’s called the Noise Nugget, and it’s just what you …read more

Continue reading The Swiss Army Knife of Audio Synthesis→

Shell Script Synthesizer Knocks Your SoX Off

Posted on by

Sound eXchange, or SoX, the “Swiss Army knife of audio manipulation” has been around for as long as the Linux kernel, and in case you’re not familiar with it, is a command line tool to play, record, edit, generate, and process audio files. [porkostomus] was especially interested about the generating part, and wrote a little shell script that utilizes SoX’s built-in synthesizer to compose 8-bit style music.

The script comes with a simple yet straightforward user interface to record the lead and bass parts into a text file, and play them back later on. Notes from C2 to C5 are …read more

Continue reading Shell Script Synthesizer Knocks Your SoX Off→

Tiny-TS: Just How Small Can A Playable Synethesiser Get?

Posted on by

The early electronic synthesizers were huge machines, racks of electronic modules that filled entire rooms. Integration of electronics over time successively reduced them, first to the size of a large piece of furniture, then to  tabletop consoles, to standalone keyboards, and to small MIDI black boxes taking their instructions from another instrument or a computer. The original mass of discrete electronics had been reduced to a pile of ICs, then chipsets, then finally single ICs and software implementations on microcomputers.

It’s thus possible to make a synthesizer these days that is pretty small. If you can fit a microcontroller in …read more

Continue reading Tiny-TS: Just How Small Can A Playable Synethesiser Get?→