brainwagon

This is perhaps too simplistic a project to please the electronic and experimental music lovers among my readers, but it was written by Mark Spencer, WA8SME, a really nice guy whom I’ve chatted with numerous times on the various amateur satellites. He’s got a real interest in teaching electronics and radio to kids, and so […]

Haven’t had much of this lately for Tom, so here’s an amusing musical interlude.

I can never remember these formulas, so I wrote this program. I’m putting it here so I won’t lose it, and so others may benefit. #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <math.h> /* $Id$ * * Written by Mark VandeWettering. * * Any copyright would be pretty stupid. Use this code as you see * fit, […]

Courtesy of the Good Math, Bad Math blog, check out the following video entitled: How to Write a Fugue. Oh, did I mention that it demonstrates by using a theme from Britney Spears? Warning: inexplicable blackboard cartoon of phallus may offend… well.. someone.

It’s been some time since I posted anything of interest to the musicians in my target demographic, or those who are interested in field recording.  Check out this link on Instructables for a CD quality field recording rig which is entirely battery powered and cost < $1000.   The most interesting choice is to use the […]

Either pick what you want from Wikipedia’s free list, or be lazy and greedy like me, and… wget -r -A.ogg -l1 -H -np -nd -erobots=off http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sound/list [tags]Wikipedia,Music,Wget[/tags]

Wow, now that’s what I call a waste of time!  The HP ScanJet apparently supports an unofficial command (documented in one of their old journal articles) which allows you to play musical notes by varying the stepper motor drive frequencies.  That’s, just…. I’m speechless.  Maybe you could rig your monitor to sing harmony with your […]

Here’s a site for Tom and anyone else interested in strange musical instruments: Electronic Musical Instrument 1870 – 1990. From the musical telegraph to the latest digital synthesizers, here is 120 years of electronic music perspective.

Two musical links from the Make Magazine blog: A streaming radio station called rand()% which consists entirely of audio generated by programs in real time. I’m getting lots of starts and stops from congestion, but it seems trippy to me. Some Flickr pictures from Jonnay showing the contruction of an x0xb0x synthesizer. It can make […]

Previously I mentioned a $22 build it yourself ukulele kit and also found an inspiring rendition of Live and Let Die performed on the ukulele (absolutely brilliant). In that same spirit, here is Ukulele Beatles Fun, a very cool site which lists somewhere around sixty different Beatles songs that you can click on, and it […]

Andy Moorer’s story on how he created the THX sound. He did it the old fashioned way: he wrote 20,000 lines of C code! Music thing: TINY MUSIC MAKERS: Pt 3: The THX Sound

Courtesy of (you guessed it) the Make Blog, check out Tonepad, a website which offers all sorts of PCB patterns for DIY music effects. Ring modulators for your Dalek project, anyone?

One for the Make blog for Tom: Nintendo controllers as musical instruments

Thiago has created a Coin Sampler, basically a loop based synthesizer that is programmed by moving coins on a rotating turntable. As each coin passes under an IR sensor, it triggers the playing of a particular sound. Addendum: Check out what this MIT guy did with two turntables and a similar idea.

Courtesy of the MAKE blog, here’s a link to Terry Smith’s Player Piano Rebirth page. Terry takes old player piano rolls, scans them and converts them to MIDI files. He has over 2600 rolls scanned already. Wow. Very cool.