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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

via Laughing Squid.

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. […]

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 […]