Once again Amanda Ghassaei sent a cool project she’s been working on lately as an extension of the work she’s been doing on the monome project. Sugarcube is an open source, grid-based, standalone MIDI instrument  self-contained and relatively cheap to make. It communicates via a MIDI output with other electronic MIDI instruments and software environments like Ableton and MaxMSP.

An Arduino Uno generates all of its MIDI data and drives LEDS, buttons, a 2 axis gyroscope, a 3 axis accelerometer,  two potentiometers, and the whole device is powered by a lithium-polymer battery making it pretty portable.

She published detailed  documentation on Instructables to make one yourself   and shared a bunch of videos to discover its main features:

Basically this project is:

A portable, Arduino-powered, grid-based MIDI controller that boots up into a variety of apps to do lots of things with sound. The controller has 16 backlit buttons, used as both inputs and outputs to give the controller some visual feedback. 2 potentiometers give analog control, depending on the app the pots are assigned to tempo, MIDI velocity, pitch, and scrolling (making the avaible grid space larger than 4×4). An x/y accelerometer and an x/y gyroscope add some playful, gestural control to the device; most of the apps implement a “shake to erase” control and several respond to tilt in various ways.

It boots up into 7 different apps, though it has the potential to boot up into 16 total. This device is primarily a MIDI controller, but I’ve also written an app that allows you to pull the button and analog data into MaxMSP and to control audio.

…

With this project, I was interested in making a device that was a little more self-contained and relatively cheap to make (lots of buttons = lots of $). In keeping more with the concept of the tenori-on, this controller does all its app processing itself, it does not rely on a computer to process button presses/analog controls into MIDI. This means you can plug it directly into a synth or any device that understands MIDI and you’re good to go, no computer required. It runs off a beefy LiPo battery that keeps it running for days on a charge, so it’s fairly portable as well. In keeping with the monome side of things, it’s totally open source and can be adapted to your particular audio setup/needs. All the Arduino code is up on github, along with a MaxMSP patch that decodes data from the controller into something usable in Max.

When we released the Arduino Kit, we knew that we are equiping the closet-wannabe-makers to start planning for world domination. Now it has the stamp of approval from MakerLab too!

Make Noise With The New Arduino Kit is a project by Alessandro Contini (@CNTLSN) and Alberto Massa (@nkint)

The above video explores the basic components of the kit and things that a new-maker would want to start with, including a light controlled theramin, and by theramin, I really mean exploring every possibe way to make impressive noises from one simple experiment.

Sounds fun? Do write to us, what you made out of your starter kit. We may feature you next

Via:[MakerLab]

Music lovers will often tell you that Roland's TR-808 gave birth to modern music. Acid house, rap, techno and other genres owe some of their original (and even current) sounds to that synthetic beat. Moritz Simon Geist appreciates the effort, but has built a solution for those who think the drum machine is a little too perfect: his MR-808 installation has robot limbs playing all the equivalent real-world instruments, right down to the cowbell. A laptop musician at the helm sends MIDI input to an Arduino controller that then triggers the robot's instrument motors and matching lights. The effect is a unique mix of flawless cues with imprecise, almost organic sounds -- imagine 808 State or Kanye West replacing each and every machine with a live band and you've got the idea. Although the sheer size of the MR-808 sadly nixes chances you'll ever see one at the local nightclub, it could give any of Geist's recorded music one of the more distinct vibes we've heard.

Continue reading MR-808 recreates Roland drum machine with robot instruments, puts them in an 808 State (video)

Filed under: Robots, Alt

MR-808 recreates Roland drum machine with robot instruments, puts them in an 808 State (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Nov 2012 18:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Have you ever wished to build a box to distort and pitch your voice? Here we go.

Amanda Ghassaei has published an inspiring Instructable to guide you in building an Arduino Vocal Effects Box.

It samples an incoming microphone signal at a rate of about 40kHz, manipulates the audio digitally, and then outputs 8 bit audio at a rate of about 40kHz. Here you can hear a sample of the sounds that can be obtained.

I highly recommend to follow Amanda’s website because it seems that she is working on other experiments with digital signal processing using Arduino.

Skube is a music player that allows you to discover and share music.

There are two modes, Playlist and Discovery. Playlist plays the tracks on your Skube, while Discovery looks for tracks similar to the ones on your Skube so you can discover new music that still fits your taste. When Skubes are connected together, they act as one player that shuffles between all the playlists. You can control the system as a whole using any Skube.

The interface is designed to be intuitive and tangible. Flipping the Skube changes the modes, tapping will play or skip songs and flipping a Skube on its front face will turn it off.

The Skube is a fully functional device, not just a concept. It use a combination of Arduino, Max/MSP and an XBee wireless network.

This project was made by Andrew Nip, Ruben van der Vleuten, Malthe Borch, and Andrew Spitz. It was part of the Tangible User Interface module at CIID ran by Vinay Venkatraman, David Cuartielles, Richard Shed, and Tomek Ness.

You can read the details and see the inner workings of the Skube here.

Via:[Create Digital Music]

Amanda Ghassaei has published on her website an interesting project: the Glitchbox.

This instrument can do two different things:
-it can be used as a standalone audio device, with the audio data stored in the arduino’s flash memory
-it can also be used to sequence MIDI through a usb connection to your computer

The glitchbox is an electronic instrument used for live audio sequencing. Each of its nine buttons is linked to an audio file stored in its memory, new audio files may be loaded onto the instrument via USB. A switch on top allows the user to play, record, and loop a sequence of audio. Once recorded, additional audio may be recorded and automatically looped on top of an existing sequence. Old sequences can be cleared from the instrument’s memory and replaced with new sequences live. Two knobs on top of the instrument control volume and tempo, and a second switch mutes and unmutes recorded sequences.

There is also a detailed  instructable with all the information needed.

Via:[Little Bird Electronic]

Pierre Massat is sharing his experience in building a guitar multi-effect on his blog. The project is based on a pedal built hooked up to an Arduino Uno and a PC running Pure Data.

In the blog you’ll find posts about :

• How to build a DIY foot controller
• How to set up a computer to process the sound of a guitar in real-time
• How to make simple effects in Pure Data
• How to let the foot controller and Pure Data talk to each other

I really liked the mechanism built with Lego!

This instructable shows you how to create a very simple Arduino-based sequencer with nice features:

Multiple synthesizer projects has been done for the Arduino, but few has been able to utilize the full power of the Arduino processor. DZL from GeekPhysical wrote a 4 voice wavetable synthesizer that is one of more advanced software based synths for the Arduino.  It has wavetables included (sine, saw, square and triangle) and envelopes to create beats.

Implementation instructions can be found here, while the Arduino code can be obtained from GitHub.

[Via: Instructables]

[Via: elektor.it]