ThisTo celebrate this year’s Doctor Who day YouTube Pi Synth has created an awesome rendition of the Doctor Who theme tune using no more than a few Raspberry Pi Zero mini PCs. Check out the video below to listen to the end result which uses 10 simultaneous synths, 3 different synthesis models, audio and graphics captured real-time running on the £4 Raspberry Pi Zero mini PC.
It’s nice that the software still works – mine has a dreadful tendency to code rot if I look away for a few months. The visualisation is somewhat different since the last time I posted this – the texture that drives the colours is now computed rather than loaded, and as a result it’s easier to tweak the visuals, so it all looks cooler and more electro-neon than it did before.
The software now runs client/server. Synthesis is within a separate server application, the client is in charge of pushing MIDI into the server, and – unusually – pulling audio back. So the server knows nothing whatsoever about platform MIDI or audio capabilities. Visualisation is also done client-side. So the server does nothing except pull in commands and push out short blocks of synthesized audio.
If you enjoy building Pi projects you might be interested in our comprehensive list of Raspberry Pi displays, HATS and small screens.
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