This project was featured on Hackaday.com on 3/26/2011
This project was featured on Synthtopia.com on 3/28/2011

I had to put “music” in quotation marks, since I’m using a pretty loose definition.  I do not consider myself to be a musical person, but I do love music and I’ve always been extremely interested in what it takes to make music.  So, I enrolled in a course this semester called “Performing with Computers“.  It sounded like a music class that I could actually take and have some idea of what was going on.  The class has been really fun so far, and I’m learning all kinds of new things.  The class is structured around giving live performances of the music you develop, and doing so in interesting and unique ways.  My mind immediately went to the SudoGlove Control System, since I had been trying to think of new applications for the platform.  Once our professor introduced us to a programming language called PureData, I knew what I had to do…

The SudoSynth was born!  Well kind of…  I demonstrated the first version of the software (which I hastily wrote between 1 and 4AM the night prior) at BOOM 2011.  It was well received, but clearly needed further work.  So, over the last two weeks I’ve been rebuilding the software into a much more complex system capable of synthesizing piano, flute, guitar, electronic beats, bass rhythms, and percussion in just about any combination you can imagine.  I also branched the original version of the software into an on-the-fly synthesizer that generates waveforms in real time based on hand movements (instead of using sound clips).

Check out the video below to see how the system works and sounds:

You can download the PureData Patches below.  They are licensed via a Creative Commons Open-Source License.

SudoSynth – On The Fly Waveform Synthesizer (ZIP, 3KB)
SudoSynth – Multi Instrument Synthesizer (ZIP, 64MB – Includes .wav audio samples)

You can download the arduino code, schematics, laser cutting files, etc for the glove controller here.

The audio samples used in my patches are from freesound.org, and all have creative commons licenses.  Further information about the sound clips used can be found in the downloadable zip files above.