TechRoadie

MYO (Make Your Own) Round-up – July & August 2009

Posted on September 2, 2009 by SCP

Over the years it’s been clear that there is a great source of innovation in the Make-Your-Own / Hacker / Independent Problem Solver community – especially in audio. With the general availability of Arduino modules, things recently have been happening at a frantic pace in the DIY/MYO world.

What is Arduino? According to the website, “Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.” Software can be added to the project boards via the downloadable development environment. The programs generated in that environment can connect to Flash, Processing, and important for musicians, MaxMSP. Theoretically you could develop modules that interact with Max that can control the rest of your music making set up.

Now, not everything we review in this session of the MYO Round-up will be Arduino based, but as a MYO technology trend, Arduino is definitely a hot item. So, let’s take a look at what was announced and discovered in July and August.

First up is a non-Arduino design. An electric homemade kalimba, with extra bassy sound characteristics.

The Kalimba is made from a wooden project box and spare parts, but the magic started when a single coil pickup was mounted underneath the tines.

Second up is a Record and Playback library for AdaFruit WaveShield.

While this isn’t a quick, inexpensive means to get to an iPod, this solution can play any uncompressed 22KHz, 16bit, mono WAV files of any size, making it suitable for background music, spoken word, or sound effect playback. So, a battery of these would make an awesome haunted house, provide voice-overs at art galleries, or play a looping soundtrack in waiting room. There’s a demo video showing it’s capabilities as well.

Finally, for this post, an Arduino controls a Morley Big Muff Pi in ways never done before – using a wavetable look up to control the amount of distortion. By using ramp, sine, and square waves generated on the Arduino to sweep the amount of distortion, you can a dynamic distortion that you probably haven’t heard before. The idea is rockin’ – but could use more controls, like speed and depth in addition to the waveform change.

Let me know your thoughts on these round ups. There are plenty of innovations happening in this area of geekdom. I’m thinking of how I can apply Arduino technology myself. I’d love to have the control capabilities that the microcontroller offers on its own, but the possibility to tie that into a computer interface make it even more intriguing.