This Piano Does Not Exist

A couple of decades ago one of *the* smartphone accessories to have was a Bluetooth keyboard which projected the keymap onto a table surface where letters could be typed in a virtual space. If we&#…

Ferrules And 3D Prints Revive Classic Microphone

Contrary to what our readers may think, we Hackaday writers aren’t exactly hacking layabouts. True, we spend a great deal of time combing through a vast corpus of material to bring you the be…

Raspinamp: It Really Replicates Questionable Activities Involving Llamas

In the late 90s as MP3s and various file sharing platforms became more common, most of us were looking for better players than the default media players that came with our operating systems, if the…

Thumbs Up To This Pico MIDI Kalimba

The kalimba, or thumb piano, is an easy way to make some music even if you have next to no idea what you’re doing. The only real downside is that they are limited to the twinkly sounds of met…

Bluetooth Wearable Becomes Rad Synth Controller

Once upon a time, a watch was just a watch. These days, though, smartwatches have all kinds of tricks built in, from heartrate sensors, to accelerometers, gyros, and tons of networking capability. …

Piano Feeder Gets Pets Playing For Their Supper

If you ever watched a video of Piano Cat and wondered if your cat could learn to play, then [Sebastian Sokołowski] has a possible solution with this combination piano tutor and cat feeder. Starting…

Reggaeton-Be-Gone Disconnects Obnoxious Bluetooth Speakers

If you’re currently living outside of a Spanish-speaking country, it’s possible you’ve only heard of the music genre Reggaeton in passing, if at all. In places with large Spanish …

Melodio Self Mate

While the proliferation of the smartphone has caused the personal music player (PMP) market to mostly evaporate, there are still those who prefer a standalone device for their music. The Melodio Se…

Recreating The Quadrophonic Sound Of The 70s

For plenty of media center PCs, home theaters, and people with a simple TV and a decent audio system, the standard speaker setup now is 5.1 surround sound. Left and right speakers in the front and …

You Can Use A Crappy Mixer As A Neat Synthesizer

[Simon the Magpie] found himself in possession of a Behringer mixer that turned up in someone’s garbage. They’re not always the most well-regarded mixers, but [Simon] saw an opportunity…

All I Want For Mr. Christmas Is Some New Music

You, it’s true; you really can find anything (except maybe LEGO) in thrift stores. When [thecowgoesmoo] picked up a Mr. Christmas Symphonium music box one day, they knew they wanted to make i…

Linux Fu: Name That Tune

If you aren’t old enough to remember, the title of this post refers to an old game show where contestants would try to name a tune using the fewest possible notes. What can we say? Entertainm…

Building A Loop Station With An RP2040

Loop stations are neat things, able to replay one or more loops of audio over and over again while you perform over the top of them. Musicians like [Marc Rebillet], [Reinhardt Buhr], and [Dub FX] h…

There Are Stradi-various Ways To Make A Violin, And This Is One

We’ve always said that if we had enough money, we’d have a large room that housed every musical instrument we’ve ever been even mildly interested in. While that dream may never co…

High-Resolution MIDI Controller

For an older standard, MIDI has remarkable staying power in the music industry. It remains the de facto digital interface between computers and instruments thanks to its open nature, but its age do…

Impressively Responsive Air Drums Built Using The Raspberry Pi Pico

Drum kits are excellent fun and a terrific way to learn a sense of rhythm. They’re also huge and unwieldy. In contrast, air drums can be altogether more compact, if lacking the same impact as…

An Electronic Orchestra Baton

The conductor of an orchestra may look unassuming on the street, but once they step onto their podium, they are all powerful. If you’ve ever wanted to go mad with power in the comfort of your…

Raspberry Pi Pico Becomes Emotionally-Aware Music Visualizer

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the nascent world of digital music was incredibly exciting. We all cultivated huge MP3 collections and spent hours staring at the best visualizers Winamp and…

Audio Synthesizer Hooked Up With ChatGPT Interface

ChatGPT is being asked to handle all kinds of weird tasks, from determining whether written text was created by an AI, to answering homework questions, and much more. It’s good at some of the…

Raspberry Pi Pico Becomes MIDI-Compatible Synth

ECE 4760 is a microcontroller course that runs at Cornell every year, and it gives students a wide remit to pursue various kinds of microcontroller projects. [Pelham Bergesen] took the class and bu…