The Czech team of Standuino have been cooking up lots of wonderfully-geeky sonic electronics lately, but the latest might be my favorite. microGranny reads samples from a microSD card (hello, field recorder), and crunches them into granular bits. It’s the musical equivalent of one of those inexpensive compact blenders/juicers. If electronic music had late-night informercials, I’d be telling you what you could do with sound – with this.
And just in case you think all this open source hardware stuff is just for the cool kids to use buzzwords, here’s an example of the concept in action: Standuino have built on the WaveHC library, built for adafruit’s open source Wave Shield, built for the open source Arduino hardware. Open source isn’t necessarily the right solution for everything, but that’s precisely the idea: standing on each other’s shoulders instead of each other’s toes.
In the case of microGranny, what you’ll get is an all-in-one board, and it looks like it’ll be lots of fun once it’s finished. I hope to catch up with the Standuino team again as they make their way through Berlin on tour, but in the meantime, we get specs, a demo video above, and a more exploratory little musical jam video below.
