Post by NightMachines on Jul 25, 2019 19:11:56 GMT
Just stumbled upon this thing as I was browsing Etsy for done synths ... there are a bunch of weird, home-made experimental instruments there! Anyway, the Melody Oracle is a triangular “game board” full of magnetic switches, which you control with magnetic tokens. At first I thought it was just a weird little curiosity, but the monophonic square wave sounds are actually quite amazing and oddly polyphonic sounding.
www.melodyoracle.com
Unfortunately there isn’t very much easily digestible information to be found on the website about this instrument and its expander, which lets you sequence external synths via CV.
There are a few sound/sequencing demos though, of the Melody Oracle playing together with external synths:
I dug a bit deeper and found a thread by the builder on the electro-music forums, which even includes schematics:
electro-music.com/forum/topic-68735.html&postorder=asc
Coincidentally, it’s all based on only a couple of CMOS chips, centered around the CD4051 IC, an eight-way binary addressed switch or simply an eight-channel multiplexer ... if you’ve heard that before, then you might have visited my recent “3-Bit Binary Keyboard and Melody Sequencer” DIY thread, in which I’m using the same IC for the same purpose. I’m also using it in my upcoming sequencer module and I found it in Ken Stone’s Infinite Melody module too. It’s everywhere ... maybe even in some of Robert’s modules.
The Melody Oracle then creates some magical sequence patterns using clock dividers and gates, with only one single square wave oscillator IC as a source.
I will try to recreate that behavior in my AE Modular system, which should provide many of the necessary building blocks already, even without my DIY modules. And then, eventually, I will want to try to DIY something similar.
Edit: I forgot to state how incredibly clever I find this design! It was quite the brain bender to understand how it works, but the idea is rather simple after all. Stuff like this always makes me happy, because apparently there is still so much to be discovered, without having to resort to overly complex designs. I’ll try to explain it in a later post.
www.melodyoracle.com
Unfortunately there isn’t very much easily digestible information to be found on the website about this instrument and its expander, which lets you sequence external synths via CV.
There are a few sound/sequencing demos though, of the Melody Oracle playing together with external synths:
I dug a bit deeper and found a thread by the builder on the electro-music forums, which even includes schematics:
electro-music.com/forum/topic-68735.html&postorder=asc
Coincidentally, it’s all based on only a couple of CMOS chips, centered around the CD4051 IC, an eight-way binary addressed switch or simply an eight-channel multiplexer ... if you’ve heard that before, then you might have visited my recent “3-Bit Binary Keyboard and Melody Sequencer” DIY thread, in which I’m using the same IC for the same purpose. I’m also using it in my upcoming sequencer module and I found it in Ken Stone’s Infinite Melody module too. It’s everywhere ... maybe even in some of Robert’s modules.
The Melody Oracle then creates some magical sequence patterns using clock dividers and gates, with only one single square wave oscillator IC as a source.
I will try to recreate that behavior in my AE Modular system, which should provide many of the necessary building blocks already, even without my DIY modules. And then, eventually, I will want to try to DIY something similar.
Edit: I forgot to state how incredibly clever I find this design! It was quite the brain bender to understand how it works, but the idea is rather simple after all. Stuff like this always makes me happy, because apparently there is still so much to be discovered, without having to resort to overly complex designs. I’ll try to explain it in a later post.
