We’ve seen many examples of floppy and hard disk drives being sequenced to make music, but the Moppy can be controlled by an external keyboard. Sammy1am created the Moppy using and Arduino UNO and some stepper motors to set the frequencing of the spinning disk drives.

[via Arduino Blog]

In an article on the New York Times Nick Bilton report us an impressive sentence pronounced by Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art.  She said: “The two most important introductions for art  in the past 20 years have been the Arduino and Processing”.

Not all art projects we come across have precisely the characteristics of avant-garde art, but many are able to attract our attention and at least snatch us a smile.

That’s the case of  “Crush Limbaugh”.

The ultra-conservative book organ includes the autobiography of Sarah Palin, a thriller by Glenn Beck, the memoirs of Dan Quayle and a book-length rant by Rush Limbaugh, each repurposed into electronic triggers hooked up to a central Arduino microcontroller. The Arduino is programmed with a music-generating algorithm, and each hit of a book triggers a single note, or some other type of instruction within the program. Toccata for ultra-conservative book organ (“Crush Limbaugh”) is the name of both the program which generates the music and the interactive, semi-improvisational performance on this instrument.

The performers are Sangbong Nam, Charles Peck, and Benjamin Martinson.

Moppy is a musical floppy controller program. By using an Arduino UNO as a translator, you can command an array of floppy drives with a musical keyboard. The head on each floppy drive is controlled by a stepper motor which will put out sounds when driven at the right frequency.

Here is a link to the Moppy project page.

Enjoy your musical floppy drives!

Via:[Hackaday]

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]

“Years” is an artwork created by Bartholomäus Traubeck that translates wood’s year rings into sound. The record player uses a system  that analyse tree’s years for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data are mapped to a scale defined by the overall appearance of the wood and serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. The system is composed by arduino, ps eye, stepper motor for moving the tonearm, vvvv and ableton live, all connected via midiyoke and/or serial.

For more information: http://traubeck.com/years/

[Via: elektor.it]

Percussa’s AudioCubes are wireless smart blocks for sound design, composition, live performance, music education and music app development.

They can sense your fingers and hands as well as each other’s location and orientation. They have built in RGB lighting for visual feedback.

Shaping sounds in this fashion is much more intuitive than using knobs:  rather than thinking about the particular setting a sound parameter should have, you can concentrate on the quality and timbre of the sound as you manipulate the sound, via MIDI,  using your hands and fingers.

Using Arduino, you’ll be able to control an analog synthesizer that use CV signals to modulate parameters like oscillator frequency, filter cutoff, or an amplitude envelope.

Details here.

Via [Percussa, Matrixsynth]

Glitch is a sound and graphic synthesizer, powered by Arduino, fitted in a Tupperware and using few electronic components.

The sounds are generated by Puredata, then sent via OSC protocol to Processing for the graphic display.

The physical inputs are managed by an Arduino board.

It has been developed by Thomas Meghe, and here you can find the project page.

With the help from Lindsey French, some houseplants in Chicago have enjoyed a concert generated by the vibrations of a cherry tree in western Massachusetts.

Attached to the cherry tree was a piezo sensor, which measured the tree’s vibrations. These were uploaded to the world wide web using an Ethernet Pro as a server, and a friend’s wireless router, configured to allow port forwarding. On the chicago end, a processing sketch gathered the data and wrote it to the serial port my laptop. An Arduino attached to the laptop output the data to transducers, which were attached to ceramic saucers (and later, a plywood shelf) as the medium for the vibrations. The Arduino and breadboard were housed in a custom laser-cut box, based off of a modified thingverse template.

Read here the full story.

Noah Hornberger, former Pixar artist, have recently invented a motion-activated musical toy called the Dub Cadet.

The precise rotation and speed of the Dub Cadet determines what pitches play from this MIDI and Arduino-based electronic instrument. It can produce over 3 million possible rhythm possibilities for any one bar of music. By offering intuitive controls, the user can generate an endless variety of musical patterns for hours of creative brainstorming, music education, and fun.

 

The project is rising funds on Kickstarter, to turn the working prototype into a final product set to be shipped in October 2012.

Via:[Mad Science]