You might think that visualizing music with lasers would be a complicated and difficult affair. In fact, it’s remarkably simple if you want it to be, and [byte_thrasher] shows us just how easy it can be.

At heart, what you’re trying to do is make a laser trace out waveforms of the music you’re listening to, right? So you just need a way to move the laser’s beam along with the sound waves from whatever you’re listening to. You might be thinking about putting a laser on the head of a servo-operated platform fed movement instructions from a digital music file, but you’d be way over-complicating things. You already have something that moves with the music you play — a speaker!

[byte_thrasher’s] concept is simple. Get a Bluetooth speaker, and stick it in a bowl. Cover the bowl with a flexible membrane, like plastic wrap. Stick a small piece of mirror on the plastic. When you play music with the speaker, the mirror will vibrate and move in turn. All you then have to do is aim a safe laser in a safe direction such that it bounces off the mirror and projects on to a surface. Then, the laser will dance with your tunes, and it’ll probably look pretty cool!

We’ve seen some beautiful laser visual effects before, too. Just be careful and keep your power levels safe and your beams pointing where they should be.

put a bluetooth speaker in a bowl, cover the bowl with plastic wrap pulled taut, glue a shard of mirror to the plastic wrap, point a laser beam at the mirror so that it bounces off towards the ceiling, play music, enjoy pic.twitter.com/Vs6lBJihCg

— avi (@byte_thrasher) November 9, 2024

From the 60s to perhaps the mid-00s, the path to musical stardom was essentially straight with very few forks. As a teenager you’d round up a drummer and a few guitar players and start jamming out of a garage, hoping to build to bigger and bigger venues. Few people made it for plenty of reasons, not least of which was because putting together a band like this is expensive. It wasn’t until capable electronic devices became mainstream and accepted in popular culture in the last decade or two that a few different paths for success finally opened up, and this groovebox shows just how much music can be created this way with a few straightforward electronic tools.

The groovebox is based on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and includes enough storage for 16 tracks with a sequencer for each track, along with a set of 16 scenes. Audio plays through PCM5102A DAC module, with a 160×128 TFT display and a touch-sensitive pad for user inputs. It’s not just a device for looping stored audio, though. There’s also a drum machine built in which can record and loop beats with varying sounds and pitches, as well as a sample slicer and a pattern generator and also as the ability to copy and paste clips.

There are a few limitations to using a device this small though. Because of memory size it outputs a 22 kHz mono signal, and its on-board storage is not particularly large either, but it does have an SD card slot for expansion. But it’s hard to beat the bang-for-the-buck qualities of a device like this, regardless, not to mention the portability. Especially when compared with the cost of multiple guitars, a drum set and a bunch of other analog equipment, it’s easy to see how musicians wielding these instruments have risen in popularity recently. This 12-button MIDI instrument could expand one’s digital musical capabilities even further.

It probably comes as little surprise that our planet is practically buzzing with radio waves. Most of it is of our own making, with cell phones, microwaves, WiFi, and broadcasts up and down the spectrum whizzing around all the time. But our transmissions aren’t the only RF show in town, as the Earth itself is more than capable of generating radio signals of its own, signals which you can explore with a simple sferics receiver like this one.

If you’ve never heard of sferics and other natural radio phenomena, we have a primer to get you started. Briefly, sferics, short for “atmospherics,” are RF signals in the VLF range generated by the millions of lightning discharges that strike the Earth daily. Tuning into them is a pretty simple proposition, as [DX Explorer]’s receiver demonstrates. His circuit, which is based on a design by [K8TND], is just a single JFET surrounded by a few caps and resistors, plus a simple trap to filter out the strong AM broadcast signals in his area. The output of the RF amplifier goes directly into an audio amp, which could be anything you have handy — but you risk breaking [Elliot]’s heart if you don’t use his beloved LM386.

This is definitely a “nothing fancy” build, with the RF section built ugly style on a scrap of PCB and a simple telescopic whip used for an antenna. Tuning into the Earth’s radio signals does take some care, though. Getting far away from power lines is important, to limit AC interference. [DX Explorer] also found how he held the receiver was important; unless he was touching the ground plane of the receiver, the receiver started self-oscillating. But the pips, crackles, and pings came in loud and clear on his rig; check out the video below for the VLF action.

It’s likely that many Hackaday readers will have had their interest in electronics as a child honed by exposure to an electronics kit. The type of toy that featured a console covered in electronic components with spring terminals, and on which a variety of projects could be built by wiring up circuits. [Matthew North Music] has a couple of these, and he’s made a video investigating whether they can be used to make music.

The kits he’s found are a Radio Shack one from we’re guessing the 1970s, and a “Cambridge University Recording Studio” kit that looks to be 1990s-vintage. The former is all discrete components and passive, while the latter sports that digital audio record/playback chip that was the thing to have in a novelty item three decades ago. With them both he can create a variety of oscillator and filter circuits, though for the video he settles for a fairly simple tone whose pitch is controlled by an light-dependent resistor, and a metronome as a drum beat.

The result is a little avant garde, but certainly shows promise. The beauty of these kits is they can now be had for a song, and as grown-ups we don’t have to follow the rules set out in the book, so we can see there’s a lot of fun to be had. We look forward to some brave soul using them in a life performance at a hacker camp.

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