Google Builds A Synthesizer With Neural Nets And Raspberry Pis.

AI is the new hotness! It’s 1965 or 1985 all over again! We’re in the AI Rennisance Mk. 2, and Google, in an attempt to showcase how AI can allow creators to be more… creative has released a synthesizer built around neural networks.

The NSynth Super is an experimental physical interface from Magenta, a research group within the Big G that explores how machine learning tools can create art and music in new ways. The NSynth Super does this by mashing together a Kaoss Pad, samples that sound like General MIDI patches, and a neural network.

Here’s how the NSynth …read more http://pje.fyi/QLM1s5

Paul Jacob Evans

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Putting the Pi In Piano

Working on a PhD in composition, [Stephen Coyle] spends a fair bit of time at his electric keyboard. Setting himself up to work can be a bit of a task, so he felt he could improve the process and make it easy as Pi.

Finding it an odious task indeed to use notation software, connecting his laptop to his keyboard is a must — avoiding a warren of wires in the move is a similar priority. And, what if he could take advantage of the iPad’s unique offerings too? Well, a Raspberry Pi Zero W running Ravelox — an RTP …read more http://pje.fyi/QDWfG9

Paul Jacob Evans

FabricKeyboard Is Piano, Theremin And More

Two researchers of Responsive Environments, MIT Media Lab, have put to together a device that is an amazing array of musical instruments squeezed into one flexible package. Made using seven layers of fabrics with different electrical properties, the result can be played using touch, proximity, pressure, stretch, or with combinations of them. Using a fabric-based keyboard, ribbon-controller, and trackpad, it can be played as a one-octave keyboard, a theremin, and in ways that have no words, such as stretching while pressing keys. It can also be folded up and stuffed into a case along with your laptop, and care has …read more http://pje.fyi/PNHx3h

Paul Jacob Evans

A MIDI Harmonica

MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital Interface, has been the standard for computer control of musical instruments since the 1980s. It is most often associated with electronic instruments such as synthesisers, drum machines, or samplers, but there is nothing to stop it being applied to almost any instrument when combined with the appropriate hardware.

[phearl3ss1] pushes this to the limit by adding MIDI to the most unlikely of instruments. A harmonica might seem to be the ultimate in analogue music, yet he’s created an ingenious Arduino-powered mechanism to play one under MIDI control.

The harmonica itself is …read more http://pje.fyi/PD0mbZ

Paul Jacob Evans