Ocarduina - Arduino Ocarina

Another New Year's resolution - there's quite a few interesting musical instrument projects and technology hacks that I have been following a looking at for a while. One of the things that I wanted to do with this blog was to start to highlight the ones that I've seen that are really cool. Last week I updated on the interesting Hurdy-Gurdy projects I'd seen, this week it's time to point out one of the first projects I saw and was an early inspiration for the Arduino.

This is still one of my favourite projects. The Ocarduina. I came across this on the Mountain Ocarina forum, I think after my wife saying that these little instruments were getting some ground vs. learning on the recorder and I'd had a look at one of the original iOS cool apps from Smule.

This is just such a fantastic project enhanced even more by Nephiel talking about it on the forum as he goes through the development and putting videos up on YouTube.

Here's the first prototype demo:

And then a few more as the project evolves - see how the micro-switches have been changed to thumb-tacks and are using capacitive sense instead which allows some additional effects such as note slide-off.

Playing some scales:

Playing Cumberland Crew

And Tam Lin

And finally the finished concept packaged up into a tiny little box... what a great electronic musical instrument!