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Wireless Carillon Project

Tuesday, November 4th, 2014

For the past few days, I’ve been preparing a wireless carillon that will hang on our Christmas tree this year. The carillon is a set of 9 brass bells, which can play different tunes. It is connected to an Arduino micro-controller that controls the bells. The Arduino receives messages from my desktop computer via an […]

Cool music visualizer with flames

Friday, April 18th, 2014

Sheet Music for “Being There” soundtrack

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

I first saw the Peter Sellers movie “Being There” in 1979, and fell in love with Johnny Mandel’s two piano pieces on the soundtrack. For years, pre Internet, I didn’t know what the pieces were. Although they sounded like classical piano music, they are not credited in the film, there is no soundtrack album, nor […]

Fractal Music Box

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

I made four of these laser cut music boxes as christmas gifts to my family. The pattern was generated with a Processing script, which I wrote. The lid contains an inlaid Hilbert space-filling curve. On each of the sides is a colorful J, representing each of my four family members (our names all begin with […]

Campanello

Monday, November 21st, 2011

Campanello from David Watson on Vimeo. Todd Kurt sent me the link to this very nice electro-mechanical doorbell, designed by David Watson. He provides detailed instructions on his website, along with a few other interesting projects. I’m currently fascinated with such mechanisms, and hope to build something similar using a set of tuned desk bells […]

8-bit Violin

Thursday, November 10th, 2011

For the past four years, Ranjit Bhatnagar has done something awesome every February: He builds an instrument a day for the entire month. One of my favorites is this 8-bit violin. On his site, you’ll find some great videos of the violin being played by experts. Ranjit has been doing this for a while, and […]

The World’s Ugliest Music?

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011

Musical Floppy Drives play Imperial March

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

via Laughing Squid.

Kagen Schaefer’s Pipe Organ Desk

Wednesday, September 21st, 2011

This is undoubtedly the coolest wood working project I have ever seen. A wooden desk whose drawers emit pipe organ sounds ranging over an octave. Open the doors to play a particular melody, and a secret compartment opens. The password can be changed by turning wood screws on the wooden pneumatic logic board, shown below. […]

Musical Chess

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Beth Block shot and edited this video excerpt of my piece ‘Kasparov vs. Deep Blue’ at last June’s concert in Eagle Rock. In this piece, a computer-chess engine produces music in real-time as actors recreate a famous chess match on a chess board which is wired to the computer. The music is a very literal […]