SOT: New interesting soundtoy: The Buddha Machine

[Tim Escobedo]

I just got one of these  in the mail today:



It's a music release permanently wrapped in hardware...  a lo fi drone-ish loop player from China-based duo FM3. Resembles a primitively made pocket AM radio with two controls: on/off/volume wheel and a slide switch that changes "tracks" each time it's toggled, shifting to the next of nine loops of varying length permanently burned into memory. The sound comes out through your headphones, sounding like hissy 8 bit recordings, or through the tiny built-in speaker for extra lo-fi mojo.

I'm in love with this concept as a music delivery system. What's most interesting is that it's a low technology gadget, it's qualities successfully exploited by the nature of the ambient loops contained within. Sort of a anti-iPod. The perfect thing for adding a soundtrack to your everyday mundane activities.

It arrived in a enigmatic brightly illustrated box that reveals no hint about the contents inside. At $23, really a remarkable, if geeky, concept. I'd love getting a crack at making one myself.

[snorky]

Interesting.  Where did you buy it and what music did it come with?

That image is pretty funny - it's an animated gif with a really long loop time!  :-)

- Mark

[Tim Escobedo]

I bought it online from a company called Forced Exposure. It comes with nine loops that can be heard at the website, all less than 60 seconds each. The loops on the website are much cleaner than they sound through the Buddha Machine hardware. The ninth loop is annoyingly short and repetitive, but the rest are nicely done atmospheric sounds without obvious loop points.

[krachbox]

hi,

i saw a similar thing, put into a cd case once, but don't ask me where.

kbm

[cd]

A relative of mine got something similar as a free handout from Buddhist monks while on vacation.  Looks exactly the same, a box with a speaker & headphone jack holding 2xAA that plays an endless 20 sec. or so loop of "laaaaa la la laaa laaaa la la laaaa".  That crude quote is basically prayer/meditation chanting.  Horribly lo-fi but pretty cool nonetheless.  I resisted the urge to bust it apart when I saw it, however the "Spy Recorder" toy I got at the Dollar Store was not so lucky

[MartyMart]

There's a similar free VST plugin called a "Delay-Lama" !!!
If you can find it on-line somewhere, it's a Hoot

MM.

[emilyandmiles]

I think Santa might bring me one of those if i'm a good boy.

[Yun]

I think Santa might bring me one of those if i'm a good boy.

I wish santa would come visit me, and pay a few bills while he's at it- would be nice eh?

[Peter Snowberg]

I think Santa might bring me one of those if i'm a good boy.

I just glanced at the above post and for a second I thought it said...

I think Sinatra might bring me.....

[puretube]

I wish santa would come visit me, and pay a few bills while he's at it- would be nice eh?

[vdm]

That'd be fantastic for the little electro duo i'm playing in with a friend...

Our specialty is loops, and that would possibly the ultimate method of giving people a demo of our work..

Hand someone a little box with nothing but a power switch and push button that changes track, the last of which could be contact details...

ohh.. how i would love to know how it all works...

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

ohh.. how i would love to know how it all works...

It's just one of our old friends, one of the PT series, the very low-fi loopers delight.

[Tim Escobedo]

It is a interesting thing. Very simple. The actual sound chip/swich logic seems one of those nameless COB blobs on a tiny 5 pin daughterboard, soldered at a 90 degree angle to the main PCB. The speaker and headphones are driven by a common TDA2822M.

Apparently, the idea did come from some buddhist temples that use and distribute similar "chant boxes" with prerecorded loops. One interview suggested that the manufacturing is done on the site of the temple! How cool is that for religion!

What I'd like to see as a improvement would be to have perhaps three 60 second loops, running simultaneously, fading in and out in different at different rates, perhaps 20, 45, and 70 seconds. This would make the repetition much less noticable, creating a kind of pseudorandom composition, as harmonious or dissonant as the ingenuity of the prerecorded loops themselves.

[Peter Snowberg]

This thread is starting to sound Eno-esque.

vdm, it sound like what you want could be as simple as a cheap FLASH based MP3 player

$20! http://www4.shopping.com/xPC-ET300

a little more:
http://www4.shopping.com/xPC-RCA_Lyra_RD1071
http://www4.shopping.com/xPC-Apacer_Memory_Audio_Steno_AV230_0_MB
http://www4.shopping.com/xPC-BUSlink_MP3_LBD128_128_MB

A device like this box is really pretty simple. in that little Chip-On-Board blob is quite possibly a mask-ROM containing an 8 bit sample, along with an oscillator, an address counter, and a D/A converter.

The oscillator provides a count at the sample frequency which is low to keep the amount of memory used to a minimum. That clock goes to a counter which is counting the address up by one each time, providing a new ROM address for each clock tick. The data at that ROM address is fed to the D/A where it becomes an analog signal. After that a simple filter is used to try to remove much of the information in the signal from above half the sample frequency and a little amp brings it to the speaker.

To build one from scratch, digitize the samples at 8 bits, burn them into an EPROM, make a clock from a 555, attach that to a couple of 4040s, or 74xx161s, or 74xx393s or any other counter chip which are then connected to the EPROM address bus pins, attach the EPROM data bus to an R-2R resistor ladder D/A and filter the result with an opamp before driving a LM386 for a speaker/headphones.

These boards start to look somewhat nasty after a while with the buses and all the chips. If you want to go microcontroller, an Atmel AVR + a serial flash would do what you need, but the cost would be about the same as the $20 player above. The difference is that with the AVR+FLASH, you have 512K to play with and there is no reason that you can't have several loops going at the same time, but they will be smaller and of a lower sample rate.

You could always drive three MP3 decoder chips from three dedicated 512K serial FLASH chips using an AVR or a PIC. It's a hacker's paradise. Lol.

http://www.vlsi.fi/datasheets/vs1002.pdf