PICO2/AFPOC

February saw another momentous step in the ambitious John Cage Organ Art Project at Halberstadt when the playing chord changed for the first time in two years. The resultant chord will now continue to play for another two years before the next change. The project is a performance of John Cage's ORGAN2/ASLSP, generally known by …

Arduino Guess the Frequency Game

This is a bit of an odd one, but I was asked to put something musically related together as a game to get in the spirit of the season, so I thought something along the lines of an Arduino adjustable tone generator with the aim being the player has to tune it by ear to …

XIAO SAMD21, Arduino and MIDI

I've had a few Seeedstudio XIAO SAMD21 boards (previously known as the Seeeduino XIAO) for a while but haven't really done much with them.  I had a brief go with Circuitpython to build a CircuitPython USB to Serial MIDI Router but that is all so far.  Having been inspired by a recent post on the …

Arduino “Make Your Uno” Synth – 5 – MIDI IN

Having now tried a number of stand-alone projects, I thought it was time to get the Synth Shield hooked up to something else.  And for music, that means MIDI!  This project looks at building and using a serial ("traditional") MIDI IN circuit for the Synth Shield. The full index of projects and my personal build …

Arduino “Make Your Uno” Synth – 3 – Adding GPIO

As you might have read, one of the main criticisms I had with the Synth Shield was that it didn't include an obvious way to get access to the unused GPIO pins on the Arduino.  This is a great oversight in my view as the whole point of using Arduino is its hardware interfacing opportunities! …

Arduino “Make Your Uno” Synth – 1 – Simple Tones

Having now built my synth board, I'm going to start to talk about some of the projects that I can do with it. The full index of projects and my personal build notes can be found here: Arduino “Make Your Uno” Synth. This post contains the following experiments: Controlling the frequency of a tone with a …

Arduino “Make Your Uno” Synth

As soon as I saw the Arduino "Make Your Uno" kit with the Synth Shield I wanted to get one and have a go.  Unfortunately it wasn't available in the UK straight away and postage from overseas was pretty high on an already pretty high price, so I waited.  But as soon as I saw …

Arduino Tones – A New, New Hope

Having just completed my Arduino Nano Multi-tone or PWM PCB Build Guide I wanted an example application.  So I went back to my Arduino Tone One Year On! project which was designed to do something interesting with my very first projects in celebration of one year of my blog!  At the time, I wrote: "Note it should …

Arduino Nano Multi-tone or PWM PCB – Part 2

This is the build guide for my Arduino Nano Multi-tone or PWM PCB. Warning! I strongly recommend using old or second hand equipment for your experiments.  I am not responsible for any damage to expensive instruments! These are the key Arduino tutorials for the main concepts used in this project: Arduino PWM Sound Output Arduino Multi …

Arduino Nano Multi-tone or PWM PCB

My latest Lo-Fi Orchestra piece is calling out for more brass and woodwind, so I'm thinking about ways to expand the setup. One thing I always wanted to improve on is the banks of Arduino Nanos I'm currently using for brass and strings.  This PCB design will hopefully provide a much neater solution to my …