FEATURE
t’s not every day I get to build a
synthesizer that doubles as a
cabinet of curiosities for a raccoon
skull, but then, it’s not every day I
get gifted a raccoon carcass.
The roots for this project,
which I’m calling the Rackety
Raccoon Synthesizer, stretch
back to last August when an ex
of mine showed up at my
front door with a gleam in
his eye and a beaming
smile on his face. He
meant to get us back
together, and he thought
his ticket back in was the
enormous dead raccoon
he had brought me.I
By Emily VelascoRACKETY RACCOON
SYNTHESIZER
Ultimately, things didn’t work out between
him and me, but the raccoon corpse stayed
and over the course of nearly a year, I turned
it from a slightly car-crunched dead animal
into a set of clean, white bones I could
use in my projects.THE SYNTHESIZER
Independently of my bone-
related ventures, I’ve recently
begun exploring Arduino-
based synthesizers.
Usually, I prefer working
with analogue circuitry,
but a few months back,
I had a synthesizer project
in mind that was better
suited to a digital solution.
After a bit of research,
I stumbled on the Mozzi
audio synthesis library for
Arduino, and I was
impressed. I’ve seen plenty of
Arduinos synthesize sounds
before, but they were always
simple, square-wave tones – the kind
you hear in 8-bit video games. By
comparison, the sounds coming out of an
Arduino running Mozzi were positively lush.
There were the expected bleeps and
bloops, but also warbling, vibrato, echoes,
and tones that softly faded in and out. So
I downloaded Mozzi and got to tinkering.How I Made
Combine the Mozzi library for Arduino and a dead animal to conjure magic
Above
Why make a box
when you can
re-use one?How I Made: Rackety Raccoon Synthesizer