The Chipophone — an 8-Bit Chiptune Organ

adunk writes "Linus Åkesson has built an 8-bit synthesizer inside an old electric organ case. 'All the original tone-generating parts have been disconnected, and the keys, pedals, knobs and switches rerouted to a microcontroller which transforms them into MIDI signals. Those are then parsed by a second microcontroller, which acts as a synthesizer.' The Chipophone is perfect for playing classics such as the Super Mario Bros in-game music or Rob Hubbard's Spellbound. A description of the build process, with photos, is available."

Comments

Re:Blasphemous

[sourcerror]

Has everyone completely lost their value of history in this 'throwaway' culture?

Other people are making lamphades from vintage sheet music.

Re:ahh

[Kojiro Ganryu Sasaki]

That's not an electric piano.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_piano

The chipophone is clearly a synth. It doesn't create the sounds mechanically, unlike an electric piano.

Re:Blasphemous

[musicalmicah]

Yup. The easiest instrument to get for free on Seattle craigslist is an organ from the Cold War. The second easiest instrument to get for free is an upright grand piano, which is easy because everyone wants to get rid of a huge freakin' upright grand, but hard because it's a HUGE FREAKIN' UPRIGHT GRAND.

Re:scandinavian again.

[CptPicard]

The whole geographical point here is the Scands mountain range, that runs north-south in Sweden and Norway. Hence, Scandinavian peninsula.

Whether the "cultural" argument is valid is a bit contentious -- a lot of the typically Swedish-speaking Nordists who are objectively speaking a bunch of Swedish imperialists certainly want to extend the concept of Scandinavia to include Finland ("because it is good for us").

Personally, although we all live a in typical Western European democracy with similar political leanings, I find Scandinavia to be culturally different. And of course it is linguistically different too; it's just that for some weird political reason, Finnish never is allowed to "count" in these kinds of considerations. After all, we're a bilingual country and all that, and in the future Swedish is going to be the mother tongue of all of us...