Electronic Digital White Noise Circuit - Vocoder 

With this and the car horn from the other week. I fear Julian's new band is moving in the wrong direction.

You have a gift. You can change its tone by giving it a middle finger. I can only do that for people.😂

It's getting hard to accept that 1980 is nearly 40 years ago....

Being a synth nut, I have a great book on easy to do noise makers called "Handmade Electronic Music" by Nicolas Collins. It has lots of great experiments with logic chips.

I once used a 24 stage maximum length pseudo random sequence generator to encrypt an infrared link, but rather than use MSI logic, the circuit was implemented on 7064 PLD. This allowed all the link logic, TX and Rx to be implemented on one IC, including a VCXO digital phase locked loop as the clock source for the on chip MSK encoder/decoder. The PLL phase/frequency detector was derived from that to be found in a hc7046 MSI PLL. The whole thing was written in VHDL. The circuit was used to test the continuity and identity of a 7.2MB optical fibre cable link.

@10:00 why didn’t you use FFT to check the actual frequencies and amplitudes to show the balance across the range.

Actually, with the XNOR gate (XOR + the inverter formed from the NPN transistor), all zeroes is not a problem. If all the shift register holds zeroes, then pins 12 and 13 of the XOR gate are zero, the output is zero, and the inverter outputs logic high. Since this is different than the logic low on pin 8; the second XOR outputs a logic high, guaranteeing that the all-zeroes pattern doesn’t last!

The oscillator is sensible to RF around, the generated clock is full of hazards. The LFSR may have a big loop, or multiple smaller loops, according with the polynom used. The hazards in the clock signal make it jump from loop to loop.

3:47 it pretty much emulates the sound oscillators from the Atari 2600 (the Tia chip implementation uses lfsr for its logic, since they are simple and cheap on silicon, except the oscillator runs ~31khz, so when you hear sounds from the vcs that's why they sound similar to this)

Many, many years ago I worked (in the RAF) on the Nimrod simulator. One task I had to do was to make a white noise and a pink noise generator. Back then it took me a long time. I think I had the 930 series of IC's. Might be wrong on that!

Sounds like an EDP Wasp synth from 1978. They were made entirely from logic gates and made a new sound every time you switched it on a bit like a Rogue Moog. If you can't afford £1,000 for one in working condition, you can get it on a VST plugin.

I used to buy cheap circuit boards from toys and various other stuff from a discount electronic houses that bought surplus stuff for pennies on the dollar and hook up a speaker probe around the powered board to just hear the various sounds that were generated. I was always surprised the variety that they produced.

Julian: The Last Circuit Bender 😎😉

That's a fascinating Theremin you've created.

a pocket theremin with waveshaping ?

Julian said “... to a speaker!!!” - I rushed to lower the volume of my headphones before he finishes the sentence...

You just re-invented Industrial Techno. I like that sound!

Julian's new business, Guitar peddle effects, just don't tell FranTone !!!

What happens if the white noise circuit was placed in a " faraday cage " ?

I wonder what would happen if you put a piece of wire (to act as an antenna) on one or more of those pins? Could one possibility be a noise theramin? Will it pick up more noise from the environment? Something to try, if you so wish.

Those tones are like chimes.... or almost like the random sounds we used to output on our old 8bit computers.Nice weirdness :)

That's it then. You can make a numbers station

What strikes me is how similar this pseudo random noise sounds to my 56k modem from back in the day. To my years, encoded data is indistinguishable from random data.

Most certainly I am going to build this circuit. Think of it what you want, but I see this as a nice communicator with the spirits. Currently radio's are used for that, but this kind of white noise, which can actually be changed indirectly, I think will work great. I even caught some 'voices' talking in the noise of this video. But I would need to extract the audio to play it at different speeds to extract the info.

interesting design with some cool effects, though I have to say that back in my day (early 80s), we made perfectly stable white noise generators by using a reverse biased NPN transistor. I guess these days everything is just way more complex than it needs to be LOL :)

Sounds like Orac being switched off

I love messing with LFSRs too. I have a TI SN76477N complex sound generator that I believe uses this method as it's noise source.

I'd love to see a capture of the shutdown.

Julian's home made theremin ;-)

What an amazing random number generator that would make!!! ... hmmmm

Id love to see you have a go at building a guitar effects pedal on a bread board.

So, what you've essentially done, is build a kind of randomised theramin? I'd really like to hear what it'd sound like if you fed actual audio into this thing at some point

It's a geiger counter really, your finger is radioactive 🤣 my tintus has just been activated too.. Damn you.. 😜

4:16 to 4:20 sounds like some guitar pinch harmonics, complete with distorted pick attack. 🤟

11:53 Bold of you to assume people with headphones are still listening to this 🤣

Intergalactic communication and you haven't realized it. :-))

I made somethig just like this. It was inspired by your ther videos on LFSRs.

It's very loud, and I assume RU-vid's compression is not very happy with it.

You've nearly made a very inexpensive and very simple theramin.

I wont even ask what you have been doing with that finger!!! I seem to recall from my long distant past, you can use a diode, reverse biased to make white noise.

Low quality noise, but high quality electro-industrial. All it needs is a beat.

Love this kind of stuff!

I suspect you're capacitively coupled to the leg of the resistor. I wonder how different it would sound if you build the circuit on a prototype PCB. With such a small capacitor in the oscillator, you could impact the sound by how you route the wires.

And today’s wire colour is blue...

Wife: WHAT IS THAT GOD AWFUL RACKET JULIAN?!

What does an FFT look like on the scope? Polyphonic resistor-based theremin anyone?

Nice to integrate as theremin function on a karaoke microphone, add sampler with loop functions and variable filters, various function sensors... bring it on the market as a general purpose anomally drone microphone,(!

Very interesting vid. Do you need any extra amplification to use the speaker?

I wonder what Dave Jones would make of this! Excellent stuff Mr I :)

Nice! you have created a new type of Theremin.. ;)

Sounds like the background noise when I got my first cheapass mp3 player

How to make it without an annoying ic ?

MM5437 Noise Generator perhaps ?

It's almost a CMOS Theremin :)

Thanks for sharing Julian. Building a project yet finding loads of fun in playing with circuit modules themselves. Maybe more fun than the final project. BTW, for those interested, the Internet Archive has tons of electronic magazines and pamphlets clear back to 1908 to present. For example 50 top projects: goo.gl/Q2Eu5P Full list: goo.gl/14EUBU

When's the album on Bandcamp coming out?

Ah, the new Spice Girls album. Sounds about how I expected - if not better! :)

R2D2's voicebox kit!

Hassler circuit?

I was hoping for the implementation of a vocoder, but no. Interesting but disappointing...

I know you enjoyed this video. If the sond were a little lower i might have enjoed it too. As it happens i made it throgh the first 5 minutes and no more.

Sounds like Kraftwerk.

Digital Theremin

I never did like the term "circuit bending". It seems like some jock type person somehow discovered that hey, you know what? This electronics stuff can be fun, but I don't want to seem like a nerd to my friends/peers so I can't call it electronics experimentation, that sounds nerdy. I'll call it circuit bending instead, yeah, that's it, bending implies doing something with physical strength so it no longer sounds as nerdy and maybe, just maybe I can convince my friends that it is cool.

Accidental theremin?

RF Keyboard :D

5:25

It sounds like my old amgle grinder

Have you reinvented the Theramin ?

RIP headphone users...

Thought it was a mark on my screen but turns out to be a speck on that grotty cutting mat lol 😂

com trought finger

I had to stop the video that cacophony was intolerable..

Rhythmic beat?? Its not like you can dance to it 😂😂😂

this video was definitely a good burn-in for my new headset edit: i don't believe in such things as burn-in

This is more like Joulie Baby. No more taking the chuck off of drills please. How about one on the crappy 340 chip that infests so many arduino knockoffs and cost so many hours of human life wasted fighting com port sickness on windows?

Cool.

Theremin ?

Let me play the song of my people.

note to self: a speaker appers in your video = instant mute. Come on Julian, you're killing me :(

OK, that's weird...sounding.

That was genuinely difficult to listen to at times, I had to skip through.

I think I would rather stick pins in my eyes than watch this crap by this shrill.