We’re not sure exactly what Tulip is, because it’s so many things all at once. It’s a music-making environment that’s programmable in Python, runs on your big computer or on an ESP32-S3, and comes complete with some nice sounding synth engines, a sequencer, and a drum machine all built in. It’s like your dream late-1980s synthesizer workstation, but running on a dev board that you can get for a song.

And because Tulip is made of open-source software and hardware, you can extend the heck out of it. For instance, as demonstrated in this video by [Floyd Steinberg], you can turn it into a fully contained portable device by adding a touchscreen. That incarnation is available from Makerfabs, and it’s a bargain, especially considering that the developer [Brian Whitman] gets some of the proceeds. Or, because it’s written in portable Python, you can run it on your desktop computer for free.

The most interesting part of Tulip for us, as programmer-musicians, is that it boots up into a Micrypython REPL. This is a synth workstation with a command-line prompt as its primary interface. It has an always-running main loop, and you make music by writing functions that register as callbacks with the main loop. If you were fast, you could probably live-code up something pretty interesting. Or maybe it wants to be extended into a physical musical instrument by taking in triggers from the ESP32’s GPIOs? Oh, and did we mention it sends MIDI out just as happily as it takes it in? What can’t Tulip do?

We’ve seen some pretty neat minimalist music-making devices lately, but in a sense Tulip takes the cake: it’s essentially almost entirely software. The various hardware incarnations are just possibilities, and because it’s all open and extremely portable, you can freely choose among them. We really like the design and sound of the AMY software synthesizer engine that powers the Tulip, and we’re sure that more synthesizer models will be written for it. This is a music project that you want to keep your eyes on in the future.

Various decades have their musical signature, like the excessive use of synthesizers and hairspray in the 1980s pop music scene. Likewise, the early 2010s was marked by a fairly extreme use of autotune, a technology that allows sounds, especially vocals, to be shifted to precise pitches regardless of the pitch of the original source. In this dark era, a wide swath of instruments and voices on the charts were auto-tuned at some point, although we don’t remember this iconic instrument ever being featured among the annals of pitch-shifted pop music.

The auto-tuned kazoo created by [Guy Dupont] does its pitch corrections on-the-fly thanks to a built-in ESP-32-S3 microcontroller which, through a microphone inside the kazoo, listens for note of the musician’s hum and corrects it to the closest correctly pitched note. Once it identifies the note it outputs a kazoo-like pitch-corrected note from a small speaker, also hidden inside the instrument. It does this fast enough for live performances using the YIN fundamental frequency estimation algorithm. Not only can the kazoo be played directly, but thanks to the implementation of MIDI it can be used to control other synthesizers or be played through other means as a stand-alone synthesizer.

Much like the 80s, where the use of synthesizers relaxed from excessive use on nearly every instrument on every track throughout the decade to a more restrained use as the decade faded, so has autotune been toned down in most music to be more subtly applied. But like our enjoyment of heavily synthesized tunes outside the 80s like those by Daft Punk or The Weeknd, we can also appreciate something heavily auto-tuned outside of the 2010s like a stylized kazoo or a T-Pain-style guitar effects pedal.

MIDI as a standard has opened up a huge world to any musician willing to use a computer to generate or enhance their playing and recording. Since the 80s, it has it has revolutionized the way music is produced and performed, allowing for seamless integration of digital instruments, automation of complex sequences, and unprecedented control over everything from production to editing. It has also resulted in a number of musical instruments that probably wouldn’t be possible without electronic help, like this MIDI instrument which might be the world’s smallest.

Fitting into a cubic inch of space, the tiny instrument’s volume is mostly taken up by the MIDI connector itself which was perhaps an acceptable size by 1980s standards but seems rather bulky today. A two-layer PCB split into three sections sandwiches the connector in place and boasts an ATtiny85 microcontroller and all the associated electronics needed to implement MIDI. Small threaded screws hold the platform together and provide each layer with a common ground. Four small pushbuttons at the top of the device act as the instrument’s keys.

The project’s creator (and Hackaday alum!) [Jeremy Cook] has it set up to play notes from a piano right now, but has also made the source code available so that any musical action can be programmed onto these buttons. Flexibility is perhaps MIDI’s greatest strength and why the standard has lasted for decades now, as it makes it fairly straightforward to build more comprehensive, easy-to-learn musical instruments or even musical instruments out of retro video game systems.