This means I can leave percussion off the organ. But does anyone play the washboard or frottoir in Spain?

More appropriate. A calliope is a musical instrument that produces sound by sending steam through whistles, originally locomotive whistles. The calliope is also known as a “steam organ” or “steam piano”. It was often played on riverboats and in circuses, where it was sometimes mounted on a carved, painted and gilded horse-drawn wagon in a circus parade (picture, right). The instrument’s name originates from Greek mythology: Calliope (pronounced /kə.ˈlaɪ.o.pi/), daughter of Zeus, was chief of the Muses and mother of Orpheus. Her name, in Greek, means “beautiful voiced”. A calliope is typically very loud; even small calliopes produce sound that can travel for miles.

Here

Trouble@This Is the Modern World plays a simply divine collection of tracks.

Rather than mucking around with Gumstix and stuff, the excellent Christian Blanchard runs his Orgautomatix from MIDI data and a MIDI reader on a Palm (pic here of the setup). Old Palms go for a tenner and the Z22 is around 70 quid at the moment. IttyMidi does a package including an old Palm (only 8MB) for 120USD, so that’s about 3.50€ ;o) There’s a group, PalmSounds, dedicated to handhelds and music. Old list of software here, but all I want is a controller.

David Marks has done something similar:

I too am building a midi organ which played its first basic tune today !. Mine is powered by a surplus blower fan I bought from Alan Pell and which I am driving with a bench grindstone motor. I built my own controller from a DIY MIdi website. It has at present 64 outputs but can easily be upgraded to 128. I have modified a Palm PDA cable to supply a midi output from a Palm M130 and use midi player software downloaded from the States.

128 outputs sounds useful. I assume you could also do that by banking two shrinkwrapped 64-output modules. But I am not an electrical engineer, or any genuine type of engineer for that matter.

I can’t really see the point of buying a proprietary MIDI controller like this one:

(Christian is also using the http://www.j-omega.co.uk/ as the next link in the chain.)

As you can see in the photo of the monkey under construction he sits on a circular ply board that is attached to a bar the other end of which runs in a gear-driven eccentric self-aligning bearing which rocks him with a circular motion. This motion is continuous and draws attention to him. If a coin is inserted into the slot he raises his hat, wiggles his feet and raises a notice from a slot in the base which says ‘Thank You’.

A couple of things found (a Topsy, for example, “runs for 7 hours on a 12 volt 30 AH battery“):

1. http://www.mark-ju.net/bike_ride/equipment/charger.htm charges stack of 6Vs
2. For about the same weight as a generator setup, you could get a solar charger that works whether you
   are pedaling or not. Batteries.com has one that weighs .28 pounds and will charge 4 AAs in “as
   little as 12 hours of direct sun” and costs 20 bucks.
3. http://geektechnique.org/projectlab/511 Bike-charger for iPod
4. http://geektechnique.org/projectlab/236 previous hand crank version

Trad dynamo setup = easier initial setup but less reliable

http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/27314
http://wfmu.org/listen.ram?show=27314&archive=42923 nice xylophone stuff

D says re controlling barrel organ valves using MIDI:

Could probably do that very neatly using micro pc like a gumstix
No need for hard drive for midi files - use flash memory. Power it off solar/dynamo, probably.

Customer projects

Do I want something like this? You bet:

More random interesting stuff

• Roomba & Gumstix

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