Collaborate Disseminate
Hit something with a hammer, and it makes a sound. If you’re lucky, it might even make a pleasant sound, which is the idea behind the Great Stalacpipe Organ in …read more Continue reading Virginia Cave is the Largest Musical Instrument In The World
Every hacker appreciates how off-the-shelf parts can be combined into something greater, and [bryan.lowder] demonstrates this beautifully with his organ-playing skeleton, a wonderful entry to our 2023 Halloween Contest! Skelly …read more Continue reading 2023 Halloween Hackfest: Organ-playing Skeleton Livens Up Halloween
Certain among our readership will no doubt remember attaching a playing card to the front fork of one’s bicycle so that the spokes flapped the card as the wheel rotated. …read more Continue reading This Found-Sound Organ Was Made with Python and a Laser Cutter
The Quadrivium EnsembleBot project is a mashup between old school musical instruments and the modern MIDI controlled world. Built by a small team over several years, these hand crafted instruments …read more Continue reading The Quadrivium EnsembleBot Is A Labour Of Love
Older readers may remember the Stylophone, a small battery powered electric organ using conductive PCB pads and a stylus to create notes. The simple multivibrators in those instruments made them …read more Continue reading Polyphony On A Tiny Scale
Church organs may be mechanically complicated and super old-school, but they share something in common with the earliest computer sound chips. In theory, and largely in practice, they produce very …read more Continue reading The Sixtyforgan Proves That Church Organs Are Definitely Chiptune
Younger readers may not recall the days when every mall had a music store — not the kind where tapes and LPs were sold, but the kind where you could buy instruments. These places inevitably had an employee belting out …read more
Continue reading Tonewheels Warble in This Organ-Inspired Musical Instrument
Way back in the 1970s, when smog laws were choking American V8s and the oil crisis was in full swing, Wurlitzer released their Key Note Visualizer. Intended as a teaching aid, the device lit up keys on a keyboard graphic, allowing an organ player to visually demonstrate their performance to …read more
Continue reading Wurlitzer Note Visualizer Gets a 2020-Spec Replica
Fair warning for the squeamish: some versions of [Will Cogley]’s animatronic heart are realistic enough that you might not want to watch the video below. That’d be a shame though, because he really put a lot of effort into the build, and the results have a lot to teach about …read more
For his final project in [Bruce Land]’s infamous microcontroller design class, [Mark] set out to make a decently-sized synth that sounds good. We think you’ll agree that he succeeded in spades. Don’t let those tiny buttons fool you, because it doesn’t sound like a toy.
Why does it sound so …read more
Continue reading Additive, Multi-Voice Synth Preserves Sounds, Too