Metronome or Music Computer? Music Geek Tries the Raspberry Pi/Linux-Based 'Organelle' (medium.com) 41
navindra (Slashdot reader #7,571) is a professional coder and an amateur musician. He writes:
Music and technology have always been intertwined and this has never been truer with computer technology. I set out on a simple quest to find a better metronome, settled for a digital sample sequencer, but ended up fascinated by the Organelle music computer running Pure Data on a Raspberry Pi and Linux.
"The entire system runs open source software and may be customized at every level," explains its web page. From navindra's article: [T]he Organelle is hard to define, but it is nothing less than a music computer, almost demanding that one ascend from mere musician to virtual instrument designer.
Organelle patches are readily available for beat-making purposes, including sample sequencer or drum machine functions, multi-dimensional sequencers, and, yes, even a straight up metronome. Beyond the factory patches, the user community contribute their own creations... Pure Data code initially looks like low-level symbolic code — fortunately, it is easy to make something musical in short order, if one has a handle on sound synthesis and MIDI concepts.
The Organelle runs Linux on a Raspberry Pi with everything that entails — it has a boot up time of 12 seconds, yields a 6 hour battery life on 4 AA batteries (roughly proportional to the volca power draw), and things like swapping samples is trivially done with a file manager, eliminating the need for special software. Similarly, adding or modifying patches is just as easy — modifying the existing Metronome patch with a new sound could be as easy as dropping in a new .wav file.
Needless to say, the Organelle is constantly evolving and improving...
"The entire system runs open source software and may be customized at every level," explains its web page. From navindra's article: [T]he Organelle is hard to define, but it is nothing less than a music computer, almost demanding that one ascend from mere musician to virtual instrument designer.
Organelle patches are readily available for beat-making purposes, including sample sequencer or drum machine functions, multi-dimensional sequencers, and, yes, even a straight up metronome. Beyond the factory patches, the user community contribute their own creations... Pure Data code initially looks like low-level symbolic code — fortunately, it is easy to make something musical in short order, if one has a handle on sound synthesis and MIDI concepts.
The Organelle runs Linux on a Raspberry Pi with everything that entails — it has a boot up time of 12 seconds, yields a 6 hour battery life on 4 AA batteries (roughly proportional to the volca power draw), and things like swapping samples is trivially done with a file manager, eliminating the need for special software. Similarly, adding or modifying patches is just as easy — modifying the existing Metronome patch with a new sound could be as easy as dropping in a new .wav file.
Needless to say, the Organelle is constantly evolving and improving...
Enormously fun, but mostly not musical (Score:5, Informative)
Ah, the wonders of synthesized sound. Coming at this from the point of view of the amateur composer who wants to create something musically pleasing, I'd have to say that while all these sounds are indeed a lot of fun, the vast majority of them really aren't useful. They're not nearly subtle enough. The musical equivalent of bad CGI.
When music synthesis first made it out of academia (back in the early 70s, yeah, it it really is that old!) a little-known fact is that of all the thousands of variations that synth now made possible, only a very select few sounds ever made it into artists' hands. There was a whole sub-industry devoted just to surveying all those possibilities and finding the rare gems that could be listened to without cringing.
Stevie Wonder, especially, was fascinated with these sounds, and he teamed up with two synth geniuses Malcom Cecil and Robert Margouleff who spent their whole career finding the few, sweet sounds of the massive Moog Series IIIc named TONTO (The Original New Timbral Orchestra).
https://reverb.com/news/stevie... [reverb.com]).
Re:Enormously fun, but mostly not musical (Score:4, Informative)
Ah, the wonders of synthesized sound. Coming at this from the point of view of the amateur composer who wants to create something musically pleasing, I'd have to say that while all these sounds are indeed a lot of fun, the vast majority of them really aren't useful. They're not nearly subtle enough. The musical equivalent of bad CGI.
When music synthesis first made it out of academia (back in the early 70s, yeah, it it really is that old!) a little-known fact is that of all the thousands of variations that synth now made possible, only a very select few sounds ever made it into artists' hands. There was a whole sub-industry devoted just to surveying all those possibilities and finding the rare gems that could be listened to without cringing.
Stevie Wonder, especially, was fascinated with these sounds, and he teamed up with two synth geniuses Malcom Cecil and Robert Margouleff who spent their whole career finding the few, sweet sounds of the massive Moog Series IIIc named TONTO (The Original New Timbral Orchestra).
https://reverb.com/news/stevie... [reverb.com]).
The earliest synthesizer in a recording that I know about is the original recording in 1939 of Vera Lynn singing "We'll Meet Again" https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] (a re-recording is featured in the final scene of Dr Strangelove). The synthesizer used was a Novachord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
The Novachord is a fantastic piece of engineering. Hundreds of vacuum tubes in a full blown synthesizer. It sounds incredible even today.
Re: Enormously fun, but mostly not musical (Score:2)
You mean because of all the lossy imprecise "warmth"?
I'll bet you $100 I can simulate that with a simple algorithm and have you call my algorithm "better-sounding" and think it is the Novachord.
Yeah. I'm the snob hunter. Come at me!
Re: (Score:2)
Using only vacuum tubes and discrete capacitors?
Yeah, right.
Re: (Score:2)
Technically, the earliest synth most people know about is the theremin, with its unique sound that everyone pretty much easily understands and identifies when they hear it.
And while it's possible to make "not music" using a synth, it doesn't take much skill to make very good music - there's a reason why Moog is one of the premier synth manufacturers out there.
Modern synths are generally of three categories. You have what are effectively electronic instrument boxes - your MIDI synth that has a whole orchestr
Re: (Score:1)
I don't get what the big deal is about this - I use a raspberry pi with a midi 88 key weighted keyboard as an alternative to the very basic built in sounds.
I am just using Qsynth and various free sound fonts. Sound is better than the built in keyboard and I have a lot more voices I can add. Latency is acceptable though very slightly perceptible compared to the built in sounds.
There are other parametric / oscillator based synths you can use too but I was mainly interested in getting the best sounding piano
Re:Enormously fun, but mostly not musical (Score:4, Informative)
I don't get what the big deal is about this - I use a raspberry pi with a midi 88 key weighted keyboard as an alternative to the very basic built in sounds.
I didn't read all the links so I don't know where you read that it was a big deal, but I did look at a few of the links and the main difference between them and your post is that they provide a lot of detail on how someone else could do it. Your post saying "I did X" is useless to anyone who wants to do X. If you wrote up a detailed description of how you setup and configured your Raspberry Pi to get "the best sounding piano I can find" then that would be worthy of a Slashdot article even if it isn't a "big deal".
Most Slashdot readers probably know that the RPi is a single board Linux computer, but I would bet that very few Slashdot readers could configure an RPi as a musical instrument without referring to any blog posts and tutorials. Some certainly could, but many would need to refer to lots of articles and documentation in order to figure out what works and what doesn't.
If we venture outside of Slashdot (I know, scary, there are people who don't read Slashdot) we would find lots of musicians who don't even know what a Raspberry Pi is, let alone how to reproduce your setup. Sending a copy of some of the links in the summary would be far more helpful than sending them your post claiming to have connected a MIDI keyboard to an RPi since a musician could tell at a glance that the RPi doesn't have a MIDI port. Perhaps you used a USB-MIDI adapter but you didn't mention. Do all USB-MIDI drivers work equally well with Linux/RPi? You didn't say. You mentioned Qsynth, ok someone could search for that but "various free sound fonts" isn't very helpful. Are you saying that every free sound font is equally good or do you expect every musician to repeat the trial and error that you did? Writing up a detailed description of things that worked so that other people can benefit is a big deal. Packaging up bits and pieces into a polished whole is a big deal.
One person or group doing work once that can be reused by many other people can reproduce the results without repeating all the trial and error is pretty much the thing that separates the human species from all other species on Earth.
Re: Enormously fun, but mostly not musical (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I have a very old Roland Edirol PCR50 50 key (unweighted) midi only controller that I bought in 2003, and a 10 year old M-Audio 88 key (weighted keys) which has 14 built in sounds (mostly pianos, synth and organ type sounds).
Both these keyboards have a USB midi interface as well as the traditional 5 in DIN interface.
I am of course using the USB interface.
I didn't have to do anything special to get the keybaords working with Linux - just plug them in and they are recognised by amidi. (the alsa midi app)
I c
Re: Enormously fun, but mostly not musical (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
John Dwyer of The Oh Sees uses an Organelle on stage, and you'll hear it on several of their trippiest studio songs from the past couple years. It's pretty versatile. A friend and I ported his professional filters and synths over to it as a prototype testbed last year.
You can even plug in a keyboard / mouse / monitor and use it as a computer if you choose.
Re: Enormously fun, but mostly not musical (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
You got your eyes closed, kid. You can do a backing track and put your performance over it. Or get a sound right before handing it over to someone else or lots of people.
"It's not musical because a person didn't do it" has no place here. Here, where the goal most often is to create a middle product that people use to create other things. Operating systems, programming languages, applications.
Re: Enormously fun, but mostly not musical (Score:2)
When music synthesis first made it out of academia (back in the early 70s, yeah, it it really is that old!)
Um, depending on what you want to call "synthesis", there have been examples of (electronic) "music synthesis" on popular music recordings (excluding movie soundtracks, like "Forbidden Planet") since at least the mid-1950s, and completely electronic music albums, such as "Switched On Bach" (to name a famous early example) since the early to mid-1960s.
In fact, if you want to go back to early electronic music instruments, such as the Telharmonium (invented in 1895 by American Thaddeus Cahill; but somewhat of
Re: Enormously fun, but mostly not musical (Score:2)
Same as with CGI: You only notice it when it's bad, so you think it's all bad.
You literally cannot tell the difference between synthesized sound and mechanical-analog sound. How much do you wanna bet?
You can only tell, when the analog sound has lost half its high frequencies and the digital sound is intentionally or incompetently made badly.
Synthesized sound has given us previously unimaginable freedom. And you want to cling to dusty old burt-smelling electrics and mechanical instruments only. Like it's an
Re: (Score:2)
Synthesized sound has given us previously unimaginable freedom. And you want to cling to dusty old burt-smelling electrics and mechanical instruments only. Like it's an either-or...
It's also given us this nice little ditty on the topic [youtube.com] by a certain Chris Clark [youtube.com]...
Re: B.S. (Score:2)
You mean HDMI with mandatory DRM, ideally right to the locked-down active speakers, and ideally ideally right into the TPM chip in your brain? ;)
#WelcomeToThSoCalledModernWorldWhereWeHaveRetardedHashtagsToo #HumanityIsAPathogen
Slashvertisement for a toy (Score:2)
Not that useful. Standard practice is to record at 24-bit and a high sampling rate (usually 96kHz or 192kHz) to avoid sound artefacts when mixing all your tracks down to standard listening rates.
A laptop with a decent USB audio interface, a linux low-latency kernel and jackd will be cheaper, more flexible and more useful.
Re: Slashvertisement for a toy (Score:2)
Sorry, but amything about 16/48 i pure wankateering. Yes, for music production too.
It's not staircases, you know?
Unless you got very shitty ancient implementations, modern hardware and software recreate the perfect vector curve from the samples, as they have been written in a way that allows only one possible curve. (Which is why 16/48 is required for humans.) Then it does the calculation with those vector curves. And writes the result again in the same way.
So you get no artifacts. Let alone ones you can he
Why not a phone app. (Score:2)
Most musicians today will use there phones as tuners, metronomes, and can do some complex digital audio manipulation. Besides your cell phone is a lot more powerful than a raspberry pi.
I know Bla Bla Bla Audiophile Bla Bla Bla.... But if you are going to be that picky digital computers including the rasberry pi will not be appropriate, as you will need big bulky analog electronics to really get the levels you want. Then you save it as a compressed MP3 where all of that is lost anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Android has terrible latency for audio work.
Re: Why not a phone app. (Score:2)
The point is that if you hit a key at the right moment, and the sound for your key does not come out in under 5-20ms (depending on the person and attack curve of the instrument), you straight-up can't play music on it!
Software already corrects for input and output latency, when determining which score position for notes and timecode correspond to which sound that is currently at your ear or which input is currently given on your instrument.
And humans already compensate for their own lag in their bodies. We
Re: Why not a phone app. (Score:1)
> The point is that if you hit a key at the right moment, and the sound for your key does not come out in under 5-20ms (depending on the person and attack curve of the instrument), you straight-up can't play music on it!
You obviously never played a church (or theatre) organ. Latency is 30-150 ms for the organist and great music has been played since at least the 1500s.
Side-tracked (Score:3)
There should be a question in all of this... Which will pay your bills in the end?
When you have the skills to work on a small computer with open source and you know how to help yourself with it, then you should go for it. There is a lot of money to be made with these little devices and many don't have the skills for it.
But you might also become a great musician and the extra knowledge may help you make better music if this is your dream.
Only never let any of it side-track your goal of who you want to become: a musician or a programmer?
When you don't, you might end up playing your new music for free on the Internet, or, you'll be playing forgotten songs on a battery-powered RaspberryPi in a subway station for change.
Can someone explain to me (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Why do you need anything beyond a smart phone app for a metronome
The TFA even mentions that if you just want a simple metronome, then head over to your favorite App store. However what the TFA is all about is the authors quest to find what he considers to be the ultimate, general purpose music sequencer - of which a metronome function is just one aspect.
Re: Can someone explain to me (Score:2)
We (musicians) all hunt for that.
I've written my own Haskell library for that. Since frankly, as long as you cling to concepts like notes and sequencing, you exclude anything close to perfection.
Paraphrasing Carl Sagan: To build the perfect music production system, you must first reseach the inner ear and neurology and the physics of waves. :)
PureData (Score:2)
Does Pure Data need... (Score:2)
...Pure Energy? Because that's what I think of concerning heavily synthesized music.
Re: Does Pure Data need... (Score:2)
Synthesited music allows you to focus on creativity, instead of being a good robot instrument.
At least if it done right. (Beardytron 5000, Beardyman's "On Album In An Hour") ;)
And not done wrong. (Clicking together notes, browsing thousands of presets for each of the hundrets of VSTs, and fiddling with hundrets of knobs for days, until you forgot ebery last shred of the original inspiration and drive.
For me, manual music making is too close to the second, bad, way.
I want to be in the zone, not have to exerc
Damn typos... (Score:2)
Make me sound like a dad from the hood after talking to his newborn for hours, trying to use normal words at his white collar job interview...
(Hmm, is that a reverse euphemism for: "Makes me sound impossible"? :D)
If you are *that* obsessed with timing precision.. (Score:2)
... aka metronomes ... Maybe you should replace *yourself* with a machine. ^^
It's the same as somebody who's obsessed with perfect mastering and 384kHz 64-bit floating point audio and Bach-like algorithmic precision... for his uninspiring boring shit song. ;) :)
While the dudes on the street with their croaky noisy $50 speaker and mic, a wooden box, a plastic tube and a set of pots, lids and pans, pull a crowd and move people to tears every day.
Seriously, leave that stuff to the machines, and focus on actual
Re: (Score:1)
Timing precision is what creates feel in music. For instance, when playing a "kick-snare-kick-snare" beat with 1/8 notes on the hi-hat, if you stay right on the beat with everything it's a good beat for a country song, but terrible for a funk song. Move the kick a few milliseconds early and the snare a few milliseconds late, and it'll be good for a Prince song, but terrible for country. They are musically identical when written, but feel very different when played or listened to. The difference is very subt
Get a drummer... (Score:2)
I'd advocate getting a good drummer, sticks and all, over a metronome. Your musical advancement will skyrocket over a set of electronics that consume valuable time making no music.
Spent $$$$ thousands on electronics over the years as an electronic organ player on the Hammond B3. Learned the hard way that modern electronic do not scale up to concert volume AND hold their musicality and lyricism i.e. realism. No amount of money can recreate the ambiance of pure silver bells for instance on stage. You can'
Re: (Score:1)
As a musician, you are frequently sitting behind the main speakers, and you will never be hearing what the audience hears no matter what. Stage monitors are usually not the same size or type of speakers as the mains, nor are they EQ'd the same, nor do you have the same effects (reverb, etc.) sent to them. In-ear monitors replace stage monitors, so you can hear everyone on stage at an appropriate volume for you to play your part. Amplifiers are mic'd, same as acoustic instruments, your sound to the audience