Tag: Midi

Most MIDI controllers mimic the appearance or at least the arrangement of notes in a piano. Irijule’s massive Theoryboard on the other hand features 96 LED-lit pads arranged in two columns with four rows each. The left column lets you play chords, while the right column lets you play melodies.

Since “just because you can” is as good a reason as any to do something these days, the engineers at iSax Laboratories took it upon themselves to try building a MIDI-controlled robotic trombone. The result? Well, the result is what you’ll hear below, which is by no means the best trombone playing I’ve ever heard.

Microsoft Excel has long been one of the most popular pieces of business software, and is used by pretty much every company on the planet to create spreadsheets, databases, charts, tables, and financial models. It also can be used to play video games.

Last year, artist and inventor Neil Mendoza turned a hamster running in a wheel into art. How do you follow up such a feat? By creating a rock band of course. Powered by real rocks. In his latest work, Neil turned rocks into an actual rock band that plays a cover of The Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun.

Like most modern controllers, Valve’s Steam Controller has actuators that generate haptic feedback. But YouTuber pilatomic discovered that you can make its motors sing. In his Steam Community post, pilatomic says he found out how to gain full control of the actuators while looking at how the controller communicated with Steam.

A few days ago we talked about Mogees, a tiny digital musical instrument that triggers sound by vibration. The Motus is another unorthodox yet intuitive portable instrument. It lets you create or trigger sounds by motion.

There are different gadgets that can turn bodies, steering wheels or food into musical instruments. Now you can turn pretty much any rigid solid object into an instrument using just one device: Mogees. Mogees consists of a very sensitive contact microphone and an iOS app.

We’ve seen floppy drives and hard drives used to make music, but laurens.weyn’s Unconventional Instrument Orchestra can use “pretty much anything with steppers, or anything that makes noise on a signal pulse as percussion.” That includes hard drives, and floppy drives along with 3D printers, CNC machines and even doorbells.

Since retiring in 2002, mechanical engineer and bioengineer Seth Goldstein has spent a lot of his free time making kinetic sculptures. You may have heard of him before as the creator of the Why Knot?, a machine that continuously ties and unties a necktie.

Brockett Parsons plays keyboard for Lady Gaga, who is as famous for her outlandish outfits as for her songs. Brockett wanted to get in line with his star and be an eye-catching performer on his own.

Digital audio software lets you emulate the sounds of instruments that you don’t own or know how to play in real life. But these programs don’t eliminate the learning curve. They’re still not intuitive. Imitone can change that.

The very talented musician Imogen Heap and her colleagues at Mi.Mu are working on a glove that will allow you to make music by moving your fingers and hands. Think Minority Report, but instead of flipping screens around your movements create sounds.

It may not look like much, but Dentaku’s tiny board lets you follow in the footsteps of Leo Fender, Antonio Stradivari, Ikutaro Kakehashi and other musical instrument makers. It’s called the Ototo, and it’s a small synthesizer that can be activated by any conductive material and tweaked by a variety of inputs.

I’m sure you’ve seen videos of floppy disk drives rigged to play music. Simon Schoar took the hack to the next level with RumbleRail, a modular floppy jukebox that plays MIDI files loaded to its SD card slot.

Last month I talked about Bare Conductive’s Electric Paint Pen, which can be used to make simple or hidden circuits. Thanks to the company’s newest product, you can use the pen to make more complex and fun devices.

A while back, I wrote about the QuNeo, a reasonably priced, multitouch music controller, packed with triggers and modifiers. The folks at Keith McMillen Instruments were kind enough to set me up with a QuNeo so I could put it to the test.