anthony mattox new media art & design

Arduino Synthesizer

I’ve been interested in experimenting with electronic music for a while now and also recently started doing some work with the Arduino. So I thought, ‘why not try both?’ I began with a great article I found on Make Magazine (one of my absolute favorite sites) to create the basic script to generate an audio signal with an Arduino. A Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) converts the binary outputs from the Arduino into a relatively fluid scale of voltages which make up the sound wave

On the electronics side, my setup is quite similar to my reference, with the addition of a small amplifier using an LM386 op amp chip and a couple resistors and capacitors for some basic filtering. On the code side I’ve created a much more substantial instrument. Using Processing I built an interface to create a 32 sample waveform and a melody. The data is sent live to the Arduino which places the data into it’s waveform array and then using a timer writes each value sequentially to the DAC to create the sound.

The interface contains two sets of sliders. One represents the shape of the sound wave. Changing the shape alters the timbre of the sound. The second set controls a series of pitches. The currently playing note is lit and a light bar indicates the current position of the playhead. The waveform sliders can be adjusted individually or as a group by clicking and dragging across the set. The sequence bars control both the pitch and the frequency of the notes.