Robot Slide Whistle Orchestrion 

The servo noise makes a nice rhythm accompaniment

“At the event, nobody seemed to care that it was out of tune. If anything, it just made it funnier.” Bingo … it’s the whimsical nature of a project like this that makes it pure gold!

How dare you not add more googly eyes

Missed the opportunity to paint the tubes in spiral white and red paint, for a Barber Pole Quartet.

You're a monster. You have 4. You could have perfectly done bohemium rhapsody on them and made each of them look like specific queen members. Awesome video none the less.

I take a look at my enormous whistle and my troubles start a-meltin' away!

You got me at the "Increasingly desperate transistor arrangement."

This feels like something you would find in an old amusement museum made by someone in the 1940’s, like those old self playing pianos, well done!!

I feel so bad for the people who had a booth around this one all day long. They had nightmares, I am sure! Clowns and circus tigers with googly eyes chasing them so they can sing them a song or die.

I'm a bit disappointed I didn't get rickrolled by slidewhistle robots.

mr sand man on slide whistles, or any "barbershop quartet" type of music.

The more I listen to this, the more it sounds perfectly in tune

There are a ton of recalled CPAP machines around right now, and although you need an ESC, you should be able to get really precise flow rates. I'm using them on my 3d printers for part cooling, the flow rates are incredible for the cost.

Beethoven was deaf which makes him a great choice for playing something on this instrument.

Absolutely top tier, as always from mitxela

Thank you for your apologies before showing us this wonderful piece

An air pressure capacitor, like in Look Mum No Computer's organ, would help with the blower consistency. If you can figure out how to miniaturize it. Just to cover it, the church organ has something akin to a bellows, a big box that inflates upward when the fan is on with accordion style walls, and then you put a big weight on it. The fan lifts the weight, and when pipes open they let out air, then if demand for air exceeds the fan's capacity the bellow will begin to deplete. Unless an arrangement is consistently blowing a large number of pipes, this over-demand period will be temporary. A bonus feature of this and all capacitors is that when implemented correctly they filter out higher frequency content in the supply. One way to miniaturize it may be to use balloons, these would be able to radiate fast spikes out of the air supply, and compensate for low supply

This is very cool. I noticed that, during "All Star", the harmony whistles were drowning out the melody whistle. I wonder if there is a way to selectively dampen the sound of given whistles in cases like this.

I'm currently researching air regulators for a street organ build. Have you seen the Apfelregal, or Bibelregal? They use a simple weighted bellows to maintain air pressure. Much like your leaky pumps, the two bellows generate MORE than enough wind, and the overpressure is simply exhausted silently, UNLESS enough pipes are speaking to consume all the bellows wind. @MichaelKrzyzaniak 's organ build mentions using a pressure sensor and control of the blowers, but I suspect that isn't the whole story.

It kinda sounds like those organs you get at fairs that use punched cards for music, and now I want to see a punch card interface for this haha

Best April fool's day ever!

I want this playing at my funeral

Bob Moog was once interviewed shortly after debuting his synthesizer. The interviewer leaned forward and asked, "Mr. Moog, tell me: don't you feel guilty about what you've done?"

i don't know why, but i really like this project. it's fairly complicated, but executed cleanly, and the resulting music is too absurd to be bad. and honestly it's the best type of thing to show off at an expo. brilliant work!

During the All Star demo, I was thinking, "this sure could use closed-loop pitch control...but you'd probably have to use a contact mic." Great minds... I'd be more optimistic regarding the chances of isolating pitch feedback. I'd love to see it attempted, even if you failed. Heck, a failure after an honest attempt would make great click bait. Keep up the good work!

Those tiny joints are amazing. I can't believe they hold up 👍

And now I'm picturing a servo-driven Theramin.

This is beautiful! I'm crying from laughter. I can just see the little flaps shaped like white glove cartoon hands. the googly eyes are necessary! I wonder what it would take to do this with kazoos? Probably just a tone generator and a fan... hmmmmmm.....

Never thought I'd see googly eyed slide whistles harmonizing to Allstar

Herbie Hancock"s 'Watermelon Man' 1973 is written for this device.

It is very reminiscent of the turret orchestra at the end of Portal 2.

The build quality and overall neatness of the final product is just one of the very impressive features of this project. The little clips to hold on the back plate for instance, this extra attention to detail is great.

About a minute in and my daughter said it sounded like ambulances driving by. 😂

Honestly, the slight jank is absolutely part of its charm!

What an absolutely beautiful/horrendous thing. I love it

I had this video on in the background and I yelled at my wife from across the room "Hey thats Davinci's Notebook!!"

Apologies are not enough. Great Job. edit: I recognize that barbershop tune, cheeky

What an enormous slide whistle project!

jesus christ also "enormous wenis" is peak

On the occasional well intoned chord, it's quite lovely. A bellows setup like a pipe organ may well make the erratic motor pressure more workable. There is some charm in the wild intonation, and I enjoy the percussive record scratches of the servos. Top work, as ever!

If you want your sound to be more tuneable, you could add a balloon or air chamber between your pump and the flute (This would give you some fluidic "capacitance"), thereby making the airflow more constant and easier to handle for the motors ;). Very cool project!

Now we know what a Clanger choir sounds like…

You know what would play really nicely on this? The turret song at the end of portal 2. I believe it’s called Cara Mia or something

The googly eyes really finish out the whole gestalt of it. Bravo!

This is wonderful. You win my best application of a microcontroller 2024 award.

Still Alive?

I really appreciate the restraint and taste of not going for the low hanging fruit of never gonna give you up.

I now really want to hear Mr sandman played on these

What a glorious contraption! And such an excellent choice of Davinci's Notebook

Old carousel 🎠 music would work great for those. I love the googly eyes, they’re so fun

What about a setup with a soprano, alto, tenor and bass whistle?

OMG, I instantly recognized that last song and FELL ON THE FLOOR! 🤣🤣🤣

Man, I've been conditioned to expect something like this to sound way better than it looks. I have to congratulate you for shattering all my expectations today :P

I was really enjoying the micro LED series but this is great! I love that you picked the Mii music of all things and how perfect this instrument goes with its sound. 😂🙌

Well that was an overblown mess! I loved every minute of it. Thank you mixtela.

I'm a composer and a music technologist, and oh my god am I gonna have fun with that emulator. Thank you!

This demands a Device Orchestra collab!

I guess we have reached Peak Civilisation when mankind has enough leisure time to come up with daft, pointless, wonderful, hilarious, fascinating creations like this.

I'm a saw player and I love this thing. Marvelous!

You just have to arrange The Frogs' Chorus for this wonderfully genius instrument. Thank you so much for being you and being here! Brilliant! Xxx

Excellent, I can see a potential 'Text to Clanger' spin-off in the future.

Achievement unlocked: Loud and Not So Clear! Survive the whistle orchestrion dissonance while listening on headphones.

The compilations are truly beautiful, kind of in the same way when you hear a kindergarten class playing recorders (or maybe I'm the only one who really appreciates it), when your baby is playing to the best of their ability. Not the best in terms of world class musician, but fully better than someone who has never tried. Bravo!!! (I want one!).

the last one fits sooooo well, almost like they made it with intent to play it on this

I was not ready for the surprise DaVinci's Notebook drop at the end. Wow

I love barrel organs and this feels like their fun futuristic descendant. It's really charming

Brings back the horrors of elementary school music lessons with a classroom of kids trying to play the same tune on their recorders. 😁

compressed air and a regulator might get you a better and more consistent airflow. You could also size the compressor tank and flow rate to get a more silent back end.

'Tell Me You're A Man Without Telling Me You're A Man'. Brilliant Dudeism. With the copper fixtures it begs to be Steampunked. Please stain the wood darkbrown, and add stained glass fronts. Some low-voltage indirect illumination in yellow or green would be a nice touch too.

RU-vid algo wasn't going to rest until I watched this. I'm not mad. Good work and rock on, you're an Allstar.

I can imagene, how much knowlegde You needed for this project: music, MIDI, programming microcontrolers, crafting the mechanic etc. Wow!

AAA ITS HEREE!!! Thank you, Mitxela! I was hoping to see more from the slide whistles sooner or later!

This is incredible and wholesome. Just the right mix of electronics and music enthusiast

doofing around on this was one of my favourite things @ EMFCamp last time around. 10/10 contraption

It's great. Love the googly eyes. I feel that v.2 would benefit from a bass drone that never closes and moves more slowly as it changes pitch.

The googley eyes really seal the deal

this is one of the best things ever created

What you need is a 'wind chest', a relatively large air box upon which each whistle is mounted and directly fed air. The air pressure inside the chest is kept constant by a weighted bellows. Each flute will therefore be fed the exact same air pressure as all the others. Air pressure in the chest will be automatically maintained by the weighted bellows. If the air chest is large enough and the supply fan has enough reserve capacity, the air pressure will not vary as each whistle opens and closes. That's the way organ builders in J.S.Bach's day did it. Air power was supplied by a rotating crew of choir boys working multiple large bellows in the basement. Hot, sweaty work.

You built it so well.... Not seeing a ton of comments talking about the craftsmanship here but this is incredible. Everything looks nice, and nice to use.

For this i would be looking for pumps/fans from PCAP ( anti snorinng and hypoxia ) machines, they have good amount of constant presure and are very silent and flow parameters near what human produce, but i don't know how they are priced.

No crimes here! Love the eyeballs! Damn shrinkflation! Are you controlling the half duplex UART for the servos from the chip or are you using a chip to help this out? Can't tell what that lone chip is doing on that perfboard. One would think there should be 10 slide whistles, one for each finger, but I guess an approximation could be worked out.

Watching this late into the night with lights down low; during the track after the intro, had to check behind me to be sure 'Chucky' wasn't in the room. Nice machine by the way; love how clean it looks; and the fact that it has a kind of 'twisted' organ grinder sound to it.

The ingenuity & craftsmanship that went into your incredible art piece reminds me of a gigantic, antique, animated contraption that I once saw as a child. I can’t remember where I saw it (a museum?), but I believe it was an elaborate “Cuckoo” clock, for lack of a better term. Every hour, the music started, and multiple miniature Bavarian (or Medieval?) characters would come out, start dancing, etc. I can’t even imagine how many gears and mechanical linkages were involved in putting on this elaborate show. It also reminds me of a live action “Animusic” video. It would be really cool to keep refining this, or adding to it. Maybe even collaborate with the guy who made a robotic guitar picking machine that I also saw on RU-vid. Eventually, you could put together an entire mechanical orchestra. Anyway, thank you for sharing this, it’s awesome just the way it is. It definitely made my day.

Oh my god this is amazing! Honestly the servo sounds add to it

Man this reminds me of the portal 2 turrent songs. Nice!

I just spat my lunch out when I heard the first notes. This is amazing! I now need to clean the quonia out of my work keyboard and cuibal.

This is a work of art, perfection beautifully silly

I think what could really improve this design would be to add a kind of feedback loop between the tone of the whistle and the motors. You could probably use some kind of contact microphone to extract the current tone, find the period via a FFT algorithm, and then correct the tone by changing slightly the motor position. EDIT : You addressed that in the video already, sorry ! Yeah, isolating all the whistles might be challenging, but still I expect that you would be able to get weaker amplitudes for all the other whistles than the one the mic is attached to, and even is that's difficult, by knowing the spectral profile of your whistles (which I can't imagine changing very much with tone or air pressure) you could fit the spectrum with an error minimizer algorithm (gradient descent and the like) or even a neural network to get the base frequency of all the whistles still without too much difficulty I think

Very peculiar choice for that last song... though it appears you gave the creator of the piece, but not its name...why is that?

Kipkay’s time on RU-vid may have ended, but his spirit lives on.

This is most excellent. Works particularly with four-part barbershop type harmonies.

Your invention has opened my eyes to the possibility of a brighter future for all of humanity.

Right before he died, my grand daddy told me "If you take joy in simple things; you will always be happy"

This is brilliant! You deserve every good thing that comes as a result of this fantastic project and fun video!

I LOVED the barbershop at the end! :-) One of the problems I noticed is pitch consistency. This is clearly related to the awful mechanical advantage created by the rotary-to-linear linkages at the low-pitch end of travel. The velocity vs. torque/force trade-off is a problem, especially with non-linear systems: the servos are trimmed for relatively low reflected inertia loads (model aircraft control surfaces), which is definitely not the case here. While I was listening, the old Animusic videos came to mind. If you had more time and money than sense, you could scale up the whole thing by, say, a factor of four, and use a predictive algorithm to preposition the closest slide for a note prior to playing it - like the Animusic videos do. That would improve the setting time somewhat, and allow faster, more complex memory with less port. Anyway, what a wonderful work of joyful, if painful, folly; congratulations :-)

That "Magic Roundabout" theme made me jump out of my skin with delight. I'm Australian, and we used to get that show out here back when I was a lad.

I love how one slide whistle just smacks the base on those low notes

Loved the Da Vinci's Notebook stuff at the end! great video.

The slide whistles with the googly eyes at the the top make the mouthpieces look like the sardines from SpongeBob SquarePants

i love a man who can build a robot slide whistle orchestrion ;)