Hasta La Gadget!

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. It’s an Windows and OS X application that helps your computer convert your voice into a signal that music creating software can understand. With Imitone, you can sing a piano track. Whistle a guitar hook. Fart a string section. I hope.

Imitone is a software MIDI controller. In simple terms, a MIDI controller turns your input into MIDI, a format that many music and sound creation programs can understand. Common examples of a MIDI controller include keyboards and drum machines. Obviously, with those MIDI controllers you still have to know how to play drums, piano, etc. in order to create a melody. But with Imitone, the only thing you need to know how to use is your voice.

Here’s Imitone inventor Evan Balster imitating a violin in real time with the help of Imitone and Ableton Live:

Imitone reminds me of the Beardytron 5000, but way more user friendly. Speaking of which, Imitone will have two versions. Imitone will be for casual and amateur users, while Imitone Prime will pack advanced capabilities such as multi-channel control, noise cancellation, adjustable tuning and more. Pledge at least $25 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a copy of Imitone as a reward; pledge at least $60 if you want a copy of Imitone Prime.

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.

The Ototo is a lot like the MaKey MaKey, except it specializes in making music. It has 12 capacitive touch keys that you can activate with your fingers or any other conductive material. It also has four inputs for its sensors. One input modifies the volume, one changes the pitch and the other two sensors tweak the “texture” of the synth. At launch, Dentaku will offer seven types of sensors. There’s a knob, a slider, a joystick, a force-sensitive button, a touch-sensitive strip, a light sensor and a breath sensor.

Augmenting the synth with one or more sensors lets you make a variety of instruments, from a cardboard saxophone to a drum made of human heads. I mean live human heads. I mean living human drums. With their heads still attached – you know what I mean. Don’t kill people.

Ototo is powered by two AA batteries or via micro-USB. Speaking of which, you can also use the synthesizer as a MIDI controller over USB.

Jam with your browser and head to Kickstarter for more info on Ototo. A pledge of at least £45 (~$73 USD) gets you an Ototo board.

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. It’s run by an ATMega microcontroller, has a 128 x 64 LCD display and two RGB LEDs for each drive that light up in sync with the music. All of its parts are neatly arranged on a machined aluminum rail.

According to Simon, depending on the file extension of the selected MIDI files, RumbleRail will either map MIDI tracks to the drives, map MIDI channels to the drives or just play as many notes as possible at once. Here’s the RumbleRail playing the Pirates of the Caribbean theme song:

And here it is playing the Ghostbusters theme song in the dark, because it ain’t afraid of no ghost:

They sound like highly organized mosquitoes. Fire up Lynx and head to Simon’s website to find out how you can build your own RumbleRail.

[via DamnGeeky]

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. Bare Conductive’s Touch Board turns anything conductive – including the Electric Paint and your body – into a trigger for its built-in mp3 player or MIDI device.

The simplest way to use the Touch Board is to load an MP3 file to a microSD card and load the card to the board. Then you just connect a conductive material and a Li-Po battery to the board. Now all you need to do is touch the conductive material and the Touch Board will play the MP3 file.

The Touch Board also has a distance sensor, which means you can set it so that you don’t even have to touch your sensor to trigger the Touch Board.

Combine it with the Electric Paint and some creativity and you can make neat stuff like a cardboard boombox, a talking wall, a cookie thief alarm and more. But that’s not all. The Touch Board is also compatible with Arduino Shields, so you can extend its functionality beyond just triggering sounds. Anything that an Arduino Shield can do, you can turn into a distance- or touch-activated action.

Pledge at least  £45 (~$72 USD) on Kickstarter to get a Touch Board as a reward. Bare Conductive will even throw in a microSD card and an Electric Paint Pen with your Touch Board unit.

Zivix promised wireless freedom to iOS-loving guitarists when it unveiled the JamStik; today, it’s extending that liberty to a much wider range of musicians. Its just-announced PUC peripheral connects most any MIDI instrument to iOS devices, Macs and Windows PCs through a direct WiFi link. The device works with many CoreMIDI-capable apps, and it takes power through either a micro-USB source or a pair of AA batteries. Zivix plans to sell the PUC for $129 in December, although you’ll get a price break if you reserve early — the company is running a crowdfunding campaign that lets early adopters pay between $69 to $99 for a regular model.

Filed under: Cellphones, Peripherals, Tablets

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Source: Indiegogo