Collaborate Disseminate
We’re saddened to learn of the passing of Gershon Kingsley in December 2019 at the age of 97. The composer and electronic music pioneer was not exactly a household name, but the things he did with the Moog synthesizer, especially the surprise hit “Pop Corn”, which he wrote in 1969, …read more
Matt Bradshaw is a musician, maker, and programmer with a degree in physics and a love for making new musical instruments. You may remember his PolyMod modular digital synthesizer from the 2018 Hackaday Prize, where it made the semifinals of the Musical Instrument Challenge. PolyMod is a customizable, modular synthesizer that uses digital rather than analog circuitry. That seemingly simple change results in a powerful ability to create polyphonic patches, something that traditional analog modular synths have a hard time with.
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[Roni Bandini] has given the world a new type of music with, BookSound. As the name implies, it takes the written word and turns it into electronic music.
You’re no doubt familiar with audiobooks, which are basically the adult equivalent of having somebody read you a bedtime story. They’re an easy way to boast to your friends that as a matter of fact, you have read that popular new novel when in all likelihood you were probably just half listening to it while you drove to work. But for all the advantages audiobooks have over their traditional pulp-based brethren, they …read more
Continue reading Rock Out to the Written Word with BookSound
[Tommy] is a one-man-shop making electronic musical things, but that’s not what this post is about. This post is about the outstanding prototyping post-mortem he wrote up about his attempt to turn his Four-Step Octaved Sequencer into a viable product. [Tommy] had originally made a hand-soldered one-off whose performance belied its simple innards, and decided to try to turn it into a product. Short version: he says that someday there will be some kind of sequencer product like it available from him, “[B]ut it won’t be this one. This one will go on my shelf as a reminder of how …read more
Continue reading Learn What Did and Didn’t Work In this Prototyping Post-Mortem
Bioni Samp translates bee behaviors and sounds into electronic music to help raise awareness of the ecological issues threatening them. Continue reading The Beekeeper Who Makes Synth Music With His Bee Colonies
You want old skool electronic music? How about 1951?
Researchers at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand have just restored what is probably the oldest piece of recorded, computer-generated music. Recorded in 1951, the rendition of “God Save The King”, “Baa-Baa Black Sheep” and “In The Mood” was produced by a computer built by none other Alan Turing and other researchers at the Computing Machine Research Laboratory in Manchester.
These phat beats were captured by the BBC for broadcast on an acetate disk that the researchers found in an archive. They sampled and restored the recording, fixing the rather …read more
Sequencers allow you to compose a melody just by drawing the notes onto a 2D grid, virtually turning anyone with a moderate feel for pitch and rhythm into an electronic music producer. For [Yuvi Gerstein’s] large-scale grid MIDI sequencer GRIDI makes music making even more accessible.
Instead of buttons, GRIDI uses balls to set the notes. Once they’re placed in one of the dents in the large board, they will play a note the next time the cursor bar passes by. 256 RGB LEDs in the 16 x 16 ball grid array illuminate the balls in a certain color depending …read more
Continue reading Orbs Light to Billie Jean on this Huge Sequencer
