50th Anniversary of the Moog Modular Synthesizer. Bass Bump Headphone Amp. The Bass Bump Headphone Amp is an audio accessory you can build to improve all of your private music listening. It has enough power to give clear sound and punchy dynamics through most any pair of headphones, or even a set of small speakers. The custom bass enhancement circuit lets you boost the music’s critical low-frequency spectrum to your taste. It sounds better than the headphone driver circuits in most smartphones and MP3 players because it has a lower source impedance and much higher drive current. This means the sound from your headphones is unaffected by factors like long cables or impedance mismatches. All of the parts come from RadioShack, right down to the rechargeable battery and external charger. Build one and you’ll hear the difference right away. I chose the LM386 amplifier chip because it’s easy to build with — it’s widely available, will run on a single power supply as low as 5V, and requires few external components.
The schematic shows one channel. How It Works. Completely DIY Monome. 555 Pocket Synth/Keyboard. List of parts: -555 Timer -100k Potentiometer (higher values are OK too) -10k Potentiometer (Lower values are actually more optimal) -13 2.2k resistors (you can really use any value between 1k and 5k as long as they are all the same value) -1 4.7k resistor -1 330 ohm resistor (450 ohm or higher is more optimal but 330 ohm works) -8 Ohm Speaker (or buzzer/piezo) -two-way slide switch -an LED -13 tactile buttons -100nF capacitor -10uF capacitor -9v Battery (with connector) -perfboard (I used a 5cm by 7cm piece) List of tools: -Soldering Iron (and solder rosin) -Hot Glue Gun -Optional: Desoldering Iron While gathering the parts, keep in mind that many of these parts don't need to be exact.
From DeArmond to Photoresistors, the Optical Tremolo Box Looks and Sounds Great! The Optical Tremolo Box was inspired by Charles Platt’s “Stomp Box Basics” article (MAKE Volume 15, page 82), which theorized using a light sensor to read patterns on a rotating disk to create a tremolo effect. In amplifiers and effects pedals, tremolo is basically rapid fluctuations of volume to create a warbling, or “shudder” effect. Taking the project from theory to reality, MAKE Technical Editor Sean Ragan used a cadmium sulfide photoresistor to provide us with our light sensor — a component we have used in previous Weekend Projects.
Combined with “sweep disks” that vary the light passing through to the photoresistor, you can create custom tremolo effects! Chat LIVE with Makers Join us this Friday, November 15th at 3:30pm PT/6:30pm ET as we chat live with makers Charles Platt and Sean Ragan to discuss the Optical Tremolo Box and stomp box designs. Attend the event on Google+ and you can watch live and ask the makers any questions you have about their projects. Many Types of Tremolo. Phonotube, making music with light. Arcangel Constantini, Phonotube In 1880 Alexander Graham Bell Invented the Photophone. While his earlier invention, the telephone, uses electricity to transmit voice communications, the photophone relied on a beam of light to send sound. A person's voice was projected through an instrument toward a mirror.
The vibrations of the voice caused vibrations in the mirror. Bell believed that the photophone was "the greatest invention [I have] ever made, greater than the telephone". A photophone receiver and headset, one half of Bell and Tainter's optical telecommunication system of 1880 (photo) Inspired by Bell's patent for the photophone, artist Arcangel Constantini developed the Phonotube which uses fluorescent tubes and strips of leds as light instruments and sound sequencers for audio and visual performances. The tubes are covered with negative offset, printed with sound patterns that spin at variable speeds. Phonotube Live : Calit2 auditorium UCSD " three junctures of remix" 2013. Asheville electro-music festival. Aleksi Perälä. TROIKATRONIX | live performance tools. Constructing the Battery Signal Generator.
This is the conclusion to my last article, “Make a 9V Battery-Powered Function Generator.” The schematic and the circuit description were presented in that article. In this article, I present some construction tips and drawings to help you actually build and use the circuit. PC Boards As I mentioned in the last article, you’ll need a case to put the battery signal generator in and a faceplate to hold the front panel controls. I’m no case guru, so I’m leaving the case construction to you. Buy a Radio Shack case, or maybe a Hammond case, a BUD box, a cardboard box, or a nice wooden box you make in your shop.
As long as the front plate can hold the controls, you should be fine. Although I sell double-sided PC boards for my projects (including this one at MFOS) I know it is easier for hobbyists at home to make single-sided PC boards. Single-Sided PC Board Info (For home hobbyists who make PC boards) Single-Sided PCB Bottom Copper (as viewed from the bottom of the PC board) View as PDF Related. RCA graduate Dagny Rewera uses soap and light to visualise sound. Light projected through a soap bubble throws patterns generated by the tiny vibrations of a speaker onto the ceiling in this installation by Royal College of Art graduate Dagny Rewera (+ movie). For the Invisible Acoustics project, Dagny Rewera set up three speakers with lights attached on brass armatures.
To visualise the sound emitted, the designer developed an automated system that dips a hoop into a soap solution and holds it directly above the speaker. When switched on, the sound waves cause the soap bubble to vibrate, but these tiny aberrations aren't visible to the naked eye, so a lens is suspended above the soap to magnify the microscopic changes in the surface of the bubble. The results are then projected onto the ceiling to create kaleidoscopic images that change with the music. "The aim of the project was to change the perception of the everyday," explained Rewera.
The soap film is designed to last up to an hour. Here's some information from Dagny Rewera: Invisible Acoustics. RCA graduate Dagny Rewera uses soap and light to visualise sound. Projects:prosthetic_instruments [Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory (IDMIL)] These instruments are the culmination of a three-year long project in which the designers worked closely with dancers, musicians, composers and a choreographer. The goal of the project was to develop instruments that are visually striking, utilize advanced sensing technologies, and are rugged enough for extensive use in performance.
The complex, transparent shapes are lit from within, and include articulated spines, curved visors and ribcages. Unlike most computer music control interfaces, they function both as hand-held, manipulable controllers and as wearable, movement-tracking extensions to the body. Further, since the performers can smoothly attach and detach the objects, these new instruments deliberately blur the line between the performers' bodies and the instrument being played. The prosthetic instruments were designed and developed by Ph.D. researchers Joseph Malloch and Ian Hattwick under the supervision of IDMIL director Marcelo Wanderley. Projects:prosthetic_instruments [Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory (IDMIL)]
These gloves will "change the way we make music", says Imogen Heap. Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: in this exclusive video interview, musician Imogen Heap demonstrates the electronic gloves that allow people to interact with their computer remotely via hand gestures. The interview was filmed at Heap's home studio outside London, shortly before she launched her Kickstarter campaign to produce a limited production run of the open-source Mi.Mu gloves. "These beautiful gloves help me gesturally interact with my computer," says Heap, explaining how the wearable technology allows her to perform without having to interact with keyboards or control panels. Pushing buttons and twiddling dials "is not very exciting for me or the audience," she says. "[Now] I can make music on the move, in the flow and more humanly, [and] more naturally engage with my computer software and technology.
" "What this glove enables me to do is access mappings inside my computer so that I don’t have to go to a keyboard or a fader or a button," she says. Instrumented Bodies by Joseph Malloch and Ian Hattwick. Researchers in Canada have designed a family of prosthetic musical instruments, including an external spine and a touch-sensitive rib cage, that create music in response to body gestures (+ interview + slideshow).
Joseph Malloch and Ian Hattwick , two PhD researchers at McGill University's Input Devices and Music Interaction Lab (IDMIL) , worked with a team of dancers, musicians, composers and choreographers to develop wearable digital instruments for a live music and dance performance, called Les Gestes . The instruments developed are a bending spine extension, a curved rib cage that fits around the waist and a visor headset with touch and motion sensors. Each instrument can be played in a traditional hand-held way, but can also be attached to the body, freeing a dancer to twist, spin and move to create sound. All three are lit from within using LEDs. The researchers said that they wanted to create objects that are beautiful, functional and believable as instruments.
Projects:prosthetic_instruments [Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory (IDMIL)] Module #2. Tom Verbruggen's Module # 2 is the second version of his handmade, wooden four-step sequencer. The sequencer is powered by a steam engine and able to wirelessly transmit four MIDI signals to a laptop. The first version, Module # 1, was presented standing on a white pedestal in the middle of an exhibition space. It emphasized the beauty of the wooden, mechanical structure, and referred to the industrial machines from the nineteenth century. During the 2012 Summer Sessions Tom Verbruggen worked on the second version, which ideally should be presented in an old industrial building – for instance a nineteenth century factory.
The aim of the work is simply to bring out the beauty of the 'old' mechanical machinery. Module #1 by Tom Verbruggen (2009) from V2_ on Vimeo. Acid house and the dawn of a rave new world. Several years ago, for the 20th anniversary of acid house and Britain's "second summer of love", I interviewed some of the main players of those early days for the Observer Music Monthly magazine. It was a brief oral history, weaving together snippets from the main DJs, promoters and original ravers. "No one's really told the story of acid house like this," Haçienda DJ Mike Pickering told me. When the 25th anniversary came around, it felt like the right time to speak to those people and others to pull together all their stories, many of which had never been told, for a book. I interviewed more than 80 people, from DJs such as Sasha, Paul Oakenfold and Andrew Weatherall, musicians such as Boy George and 808 State, to promoters, ravers, dealers and police.
"It's the closest thing to mass organised zombie-dom," frowned BBC Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell, when acid house first arrived. Powell couldn't have been more mistaken. 1 Nude, The Haçienda, Manchester, 1986-91. Roland AIRA Performance: TR-8, VT-3, TB-3, System-1. ELEKTRO MOSKVA TRAILER - ENGLISH VERSION. Ryan Holladay: To hear this music you have to be there. Literally. TD Bank Online Banking. TD Bank Online Banking. Fondly revisiting the look and feel of the mixtape. There's a box in our spare room, full of cassettes. Actually there are two boxes full of cassettes. And maybe more to the point, both are buried beneath a variety of unrelated objects that have piled up over the years, because of course I never listen to cassettes anymore. But the other night I dug through the junk and into the boxes in search of old mixtapes.
We'd been having one of those conversations people my age have about mixtape culture — all the effort and care and hassle it took to make one, etc. — and I started remembering specific tapes I'd received. And I realized I wasn't thinking about wanting to listen to these old cassettes. I wanted to see them. The mixtape aesthetic — if we can call it that — evolved as an afterthought to the practice of compiling songs for friends. Whether you knew a thing about design or not (and I think it's fair to say that in that era neither I nor most of my friends had ever thought much about it) you had to package a mixtape.
And yet ... Video: Solvent, 'Burn The Tables' : All Songs Considered. All Songs TV Credit: Courtesy of the artist Solvent, 'Burn The Tables' February 4, 2014 Images blur and repeat in a hypnotic black-and-white display for Solvent's "Burn the Tables," made entirely on video synthesizers. Read More by Lars Gotrich Once you cross wires with a modular synthesizer, it's like your bloodstream turns into sine waves. Before coming on as producer and interviewer, Jason Amm (working under the Solvent moniker) was commissioned to score the soundtrack. And what good is a dark synth-pop jam created on modular synths if the video isn't also synthesized? I Dream of Wires is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from Science With Synthesizers. NPR thanks our sponsors Become an NPR sponsor More All Songs TV You must be signed in to leave a comment. Please keep your community civil.
First Listen: Cibo Matto, 'Hotel Valentine' Hide captionCibo Matto's new album, Hotel Valentine, comes out Feb. 14. Sean Lennon/Courtesy of the artist Cibo Matto's new album, Hotel Valentine, comes out Feb. 14. For many bands who return after long hiatuses, the absences melt away quickly. My Bloody Valentine, gone 22 years, put out an album last year that jumped directly from the sound of 1991's Loveless.
When Superchunk returned from a nine-year break, it had lost nothing off its punky fastball; when Sebadoh came back after a decade and a half away, only its stories had changed. But for Cibo Matto — the kicky, playfully weird New York art-pop duo behind the late-'90s classics Viva! Cibo Matto has always been skilled at Trojan-horsing weird art within glossy, goofy songs (often about food), but the new Hotel Valentine isn't so concerned with disguising its intentions. It's tempting, when assessing artists' successful return from a long absence, to proclaim something along the lines of, "It's as if they'd never left!
" Korg MS-20 Kit Lets You Build A Full-Size Analog Monophonic Synth Classic. 2014 NAMM Show: Korg is introducing a Korg MS-20 Synth Kit – a limited edition MS-20 Kit is a kit that lets you create a real, full-size MS-20 by assembling the parts yourself. The MS-20 Kit is a true-analog, 1:1 scale reissue of the MS-20, with both filters built in (the more aggressive early production filter and more mellow late production one).
Every details has been replicated, right down to the packaging, which includes a letter from the original MS-20 engineers and the President of Korg, Inc. Just like the MS-20 mini, development of the MS-20 Kit was led by the original engineers themselves, who spared no effort to perfectly replicate the circuitry of the original unit. When it was necessary to substitute a part, the engineers made the decision based on their own ears, ensuring that the exact sound of the original unit has been reproduced. Here’s the official intro video for the Korg MS-20 Kit: No soldering or understanding of circuit diagrams required. Features:
Elektron Reveals New Analog Rytm Drum Machine.
Moog Announces Sub 37 Mono/Duo-Paraphonic Synthesizer. 50 Incredibly Tough Albums for Extreme Listeners. Music Production. Korg MS-20 Kit Lets You Build A Full-Size Analog Monophonic Synth Classic. The 10 strangest musical instruments. Modular. Music Theory. Dirty Electronics. VST plugins. EDM WILL EAT ITSELF: BIG ROOM STARS ARE GETTING BORED. 3D Printed Loudspeaker Part 1 - Cornell Research. Happy New Year! Weird versions of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ performed on theremins! Space Music: Symphonies of the Planets. Study shows removing DRM increased music sales. Vinyl Creation. iTrack Dock | Focusrite. The Writhing Society. The 10 best Detroit techno documentaries ever. Music Foundations Tutorial: Scales, Scales, Scales…Why learn Scales? Despacio: The 50,000-watt sound system designed for discerning audiophiles.
Cult of Personalities - 10 Things You Need to Know About James T. Cotton. Instagram. Instagram. THE NEW MASCHINE FAMILY. Music is an inaccessible industry for tech startups. Veils | The Oscillation. Soviet synthesizer bridged occultism and electronic music. Interview: Blixa Bargeld. The Endlessly Modded MonoBox Powered Speaker.