electronics

this is version 2 of a minimal and cheap one-bit synthesizer i developed for this workshop. basically i just changed the hardware and took out one of the potentiometers and lowered the oscillator to 1mhz. now it sounds a lot different and more chaotic.

monijonsyn2 from redFrik on Vimeo.

finally found some time to build a tiny synth based on a design by SGMK (mechatronicart.ch). so simple and it sounds so good! evil little thing. i did some modifications: basically one more audio channel with different pots and caps and 2 switches for the ldr.

micro_noise2 from redFrik on Vimeo.

as part of the xxxxx-workshops series at this year's club transmediale, i was asked to do a day on one bit music. this is a very silly way to produce music - basically flipping pins on/off with no amplitude control! but i liked the challenge and for me limitations like these are needed to get anything done at all. thanks to anke, martin and derek for organising.
attached are the slides, arduino code and schematics we used that day.

the workshop (6-hours short) was divided into 3 parts: first some theory about microcontrollers, avr programmers and coding in c. then we used arduino to prototype some simple synths (bit-bang and pwm techniques). and last we took the arduino code and burned it onto a standalone mega8l chip and built minimal circuits (some buttons, battery, chip, speaker).

if you want to try to do sound synthesis with the arduino, you might want to check out the files in 1bitmusic_arduino.zip below. this file also includes code for my little synth called monijonsyn.