Category Archives: Harmonica

The Spirit Of The 80s Lives On In A MIDI Harmonica

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In the 1980s, there was a synthesizer that you could play like a harmonica. This device was called the Millioniser 2000. It utilized HIP (Harmonica In Principle) technology. The Millioniser 2000 was a breath controller wrapped in chrome-colored plastic embossed with its logo in an odd, pre-vaporwave aesthetic, and connected to a gray and green sheet metal enclosure loaded up with DIN jacks. The Millioniser 2000 is absolutely the pinnacle of late 70s, early 80s design philosophy. If it were painted brown, the Universe would implode.

Because of the rarity and downright weirdness of a harmonica synthesizer from the 80s, …read more

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A MIDI Harmonica

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MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital Interface, has been the standard for computer control of musical instruments since the 1980s. It is most often associated with electronic instruments such as synthesisers, drum machines, or samplers, but there is nothing to stop it being applied to almost any instrument when combined with the appropriate hardware.

[phearl3ss1] pushes this to the limit by adding MIDI to the most unlikely of instruments. A harmonica might seem to be the ultimate in analogue music, yet he’s created an ingenious Arduino-powered mechanism to play one under MIDI control.

The harmonica itself is …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Electronic, Visual Harmonicas

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[sholnkin] is tasked with teaching a kindergarten class how to play a musical instrument. No, not those cheap plastic recorders. [shlonkin] is teaching kindergarteners how to play the only instrument that both blows and sucks: the harmonica.

Unlike a classroom of kids with plastic recorders, where the fingering is either right or it isn’t, [shlonkin] needs to teach kids to put their mouth over the right hole, and suck or blow to produce a note. The classroom has a poster laying out the notes on the harmonica, but they needed something better. [shlonkin] envisioned a large illuminated sign that lit …read more

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Automatic Pneumatic Harmonica

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A wise man once said “If all you’ve got is a cute desktop compressor and some solenoid valves, everything looks like a robotic harmonica.” Or maybe we’re paraphrasing. Regardless, [Fabien-Chouteau] built a pneumatic, automatic harmonica music machine.

It’s actually an offshoot of his other project, a high-speed candy sorting machine. There, he’s trying to outdo the more common color-sensor-and-servo style contraptions by using computer vision for the color detection and a number of compressed-air jets to blow the candy off of a conveyor belt into the proper bins.

But before that gets rolling, a test of the computer-controlled pneumatic setup …read more

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