This MIDI BoomBox Takes Floppies

You might have had a boombox back in the 1990s, but probably not like the Yamaha MDP-10. As [Nicole] explains, the odd little device played MIDI files from a floppy disk. Technically, it wasn&#8217…

Nature Vs Nurture In Beethoven’s Genome

When it comes to famous musicians, Beethoven is likely to hit most top ten charts. Researchers recently peered into his genome to see if they could predict his talent by DNA alone. Using a previous…

MIDI Spoon Piano Is Exactly What You Think It Is

Pianos traditionally had keys made out of ivory, but there’s a great way to avoid that if you want to save the elephants. You can build a keyboard using spoons, as demonstrated by [JCo Audio]…

An Audio Delay, The Garden Hose Way

Creating music in 2024 is made easier by ready access to a host of effects in software that were once the preserve only of professional studios. One such is the delay; digital delays are now a stap…

MIDI Bookmark Marks The Spot Where Work And Play Intersect

Have you ever wanted to take a break from reading or studying to just rock out for a few blissful minutes? If you’re anything like us, you like to rock out most of the time and take the occas…

Sound And Water Make Weird Vibes In Microgravity

NASA astronaut [Don Pettit] shared a short video from an experiment he performed on the ISS back in 2012, demonstrating the effects of sound waves on water in space. Specifically, seeing what happe…

Build Your Own Class-E Musical Tesla Coil

We’ve all seen a million videos online with singing Tesla coils doing their thang. [Zach Armstrong] wasn’t content to just watch, though. He went out and built one himself! Even better,…

Flute Now Included On List Of Human Interface Devices

For decades now, we’ve been able to quickly and reliably interface musical instruments to computers. These tools have generally made making and recording music much easier, but they’ve …

Cyberpunk Guitar Strap Lights Up With Repurposed PCBs

Sometimes, whether we like it or not, ordering PCBs results in extra PCBs lying around, either because of board house minimums, mistakes on either end, or both. What’s to be done with these b…

Building A Tape Echo In A Coke Can Tape Player That Doesn’t Really Work

Back in the 1990s, you could get a tape player shaped like a can of Coca Cola. [Simon the Magpie] scored one of these decks and decided to turn it into a tape echo effect instead. It didn’t w…

Make Your Music Simpler With The User-Unfriendliest Cassette Deck Ever

Call us crazy, but music was a whole lot more fun when it was on physical media. Or perhaps just easier to use, especially in the car. Whether your particular vintage favored CDs, cassettes, or eve…

Give Your Pi Pico Captouch Inputs For All Your Music Needs

Unlike many modern microcontrollers, RP2040 doesn’t come with a native capacitive touch peripheral. This doesn’t mean you can’t do it – the usual software-driven way works w…

Documenting Real Hidden Messages In Music

During the 1980s, a moral panic swept across the landscape with the mistaken belief that there were Satanic messages hidden in various games, books, and music that at any moment would corrupt the y…

Generative AI Now Encroaching On Music

While it might not seem like it to a novice, music turns out to be a highly mathematical endeavor with precise ratios between chords and notes as well as overall structure of rhythm and timing. Thi…

Build Yourself A Vacuum Tube VU Meter

Volume unit (VU) meters are cool — it’s an undeniable fact. For some reason, humans just dig lights that flash along with sounds. You can build a VU meter using LEDs, or bulbs if you&#8…

A Tape Echo For Anyone

If you’ve ever looked into how artists from the 1960s made their music, you’ll learn about the many inventive ways in which the tape recorder enabled new effects. One of the simplest of…

2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: A Piano-Controlled Smart Home

There’s a scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where a little flap in the wall flips down to reveal a small organ embedded there. Gene Wilder plays a bit of Rachmaninoff on the orga…

Ancient Instrument Goes Digital: The Digi-Gurdy

The hurdy-gurdy is a fascinating string instrument dating from sometime around the 10th century. There is an active community of modern enthusiasts, but one can’t simply walk into a music sho…

The Most Famous Room In Rock-n-Roll You’ve Never Seen

The study of audio technology has a lot of fascinating branches, and one or two of them even take the curious engineer not into electronics but into architecture. There’s the anechoic chamber…

Playing Audio On The Pi Pico With No DAC To Speak Of

Normally, if you want to play music or other audio on a microcontroller, you need to get yourself a DAC. Or at least, that’s the easiest way to go about it and the one most likely to get you …