I looked up a general tutorial on making music with Arduino, and found this very helpful link.
People have been making all kinds of things to playback/create music, such as the drum machines and synthesizers on that page and the awesome, fully-functional two-octave piano here. Since that article was written, a company called Ginsing has come out with a shield that has MIDI capability and is designed to act as a complex music synthesizer to mix electronic sounds, much like people do with keyboards and computer programs now. The upside of the GinSing is you don’t have to know how to play piano to use it.
I think I’m probably more interested in doing something that analyzes the music rather than creates it. There don’t seem to be as many creations that take some form of music as an input and give a different output. There’s some projects that do the LED equivalent of an iTunes visualization (like this one), and I think I might be interested in making the Arduino do something more complex than turn LEDs on and off in synch with the beat/frequency. We saw the adafruit Drawdio in class (here it is again anyway), which is kind of leaning into something more that I would like to do, but I’m not sure exactly what kind of output I want my project to have.
– Michelle Kakadelis
