Modern musicians may take for granted that a wide array of musical instruments can either be easily connected to a computer or modeled entirely in one, allowing for all kinds of nuanced ways of creating unique sounds and vivid pieces of music without much hardware expense. Not so in the 1930s. Musicians of the time […]
If you’ve put in all the necessary practice to learn bike tricks, you’d probably like an appropriately dramatic soundtrack to accompany your stunts. A team of students working on a capstone project at the University of Washington took this natural desire a step further with the Music Bike, a system that generates adaptive music in […]
[Moby Pixel] wanted to build a fun MIDI controller. In the end, he didn’t build it just once, but twice—with the aim of finding out which microcontroller was most fit for this musical purpose. Pitted against each other? The ESP32 and Raspberry Pi Pico. The MIDI controller itself is quite fetching. It’s built with a […]
The MP3 file type has been around for so long, and is supported by essentially all modern media software and hardware, that it might be surprising to some to learn that it’s actually a proprietary format. Developed in the late 80s and early 90s, it rose to prominence during the Napster/Limewire era of the early […]
[kida] has a highly innovative set of 3D-printable, musical fidget toys that play classic video game tunes. Of course there’s the classic Super Mario ditty, but there’s loads more. How they work is pretty nifty, and makes great use of a 3D printer’s strengths. To play the device one uses a finger to drag a […]
In many ways, living here in the future is quite exiting. We have access to the world’s information instantaneously and can get plenty of exciting tools and hardware delivered to our homes in ways that people in the past with only a Sears catalog could only dream of. Lasers are of course among the exciting […]
The early 2000s were the halcyon days of physical media. While not as svelte as MP3 players became, why are those early 2000s machines smaller than all the new models popping up amidst the retro audio craze? We’ve bemoaned the end of the electromechanical era before, and the Verge recently interviewed the people at We […]
[Martin] of [Wintergatan] is on a quest to create the ultimate human-powered, modern marble music machine. His fearless mechanical exploration and engineering work, combined with considerable musical talent, has been an ongoing delight as he continually refines his designs. We’d like to highlight this older video in which he demonstrates how to dynamically regulate the […]
[Iftah] has been exploring the sounds beyond what we can hear, recording ultrasound and pitching it down. He made a short video on the practice, and it’s like a whole new world of sounds exists just outside of our hearing. For instance, a dropped toothpick sounds like you’ve just dropped a piece of lumber, a […]
For better or worse, the fundamental design of guitars has remained familiar since they electrified around a century ago. A few strings, a fretboard, and a body of some sort will get you most of the way there for an acoustic guitar, with the addition of electromagnetic pickups and wiring for electric variants. However, technology […]