The Complete Lo-fi Planets
Made by diyelectromusic / Music
About the project
A lo-fi presentation of all seven movements of Holst's Planets Suite using 8-bit microcontrollers.
Project info
Difficulty: Difficult
Platforms: Adafruit, Arduino, Raspberry Pi
Estimated time: 7 months+
License: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY version 4.0 or later (CC BY 4+)
Items used in this project
Hardware components
Story
The original Lo-Fi Orchestra project started off as an attempt to bring a range of my "Simple DIY Electronic Music Projects" together to "perform" a single piece. After a number of initial performances, I decided to take the score from Gustav Holst's Planets Suite and see how Mars would work on my growing Arduino orchestra.
This was back in December 2020. Over the next nine months, there have been numerous additional performances of the Lo-Fi Orchestra, including further movements from the Planets. The final piece - Neptune - was completed in September 2021.
This project does not describe a recipe to allow you to recreate this work, but all the elements of this project are described on my website - https://diyelectromusic.wordpress.com/. I could have built up "better" versions for the Lo-Fi Orchestra, but one of my design goals was to attempt to keep the "home made" possibility for each individual component. You will hear additional clicks and pops due to poor grounding, 8-bit clipping, MIDI overloading, unshielded mixing of digital MIDI signals and audio output, and so on in many of these performances. But if you want a hi-fi studio version you should play a MIDI file through a modern synthesizer or better yet go and hear a real orchestra perform. There is really nothing quite like it.
But if you want to put together a performance in your kitchen, with cheap or low-cost components, and learn about the basics of sound synthesis at the same time, without worrying too much about the sound quality, then all details are available here: https://diyelectromusic.wordpress.com/2021/09/04/the-complete-lo-fi-planets/
And finally, the full performance can be found in this YouTube playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzYOzhIctkyVG9uuwu_MiYDFx1rvP8Y_L
Kevin
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