The Theremin box is played similar to a Theremin by moving your hands (or body) around the antennae. The vertical antenna controls the pitch of the sound, and the horizontal antenna controls the volume. Instead of making traditional Theremin sounds, however, this box makes video game sounds. The joystick toggles between different types of sounds by moving the joystick either up, down, right, or left. The top, red button produces the sounds if either held down or pressed rapidly.
Rob’s audio notes
This box emits four distinct timbres that emulate 80s arcade sounds. For this I used square waves, sawtooth waves and a tricky little additive synthesis algorithm for the classic Mario jump.
How we built it
The box follows our general box design with these modifications:
- We used a Moog Theremin kit, and fed its output into the audio interface connected to the Raspberry Pi. The Pure Data patch analyzed the frequency and volume of the incoming sound and applied it to the produced video game sounds.
- The joystick is connected to the arduino, which passed the signal onto the Raspberry Pi.
Box Fabrication Pictures and Videos
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