All your appliances are deliberately designed not to be a theremin

August 29, 2022 3:14 PM

Chiptune wizard Linus Åkesson builds a theremin out of a Commodore 64, a spoon, and a clamp and talks through its workings.

A companion blog post with more technical details.

Many other previouslies by Åkesson on MeFi.

posted by cichlid ceilidh (14 comments total)

If we don't redesign all appliances to also be theramins the terrorists win.
posted by Wretch729 at 3:39 PM on August 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

Leon Theremin, of theremin fame, proposed the technology for a wide variety of other uses, many of them for the Soviet military. He helped design one of the first wireless listening devices placed in the US Embassy and after extensive touring in Europe and the US was eventually “rehabilitated” on his return to Russia.

Kind of an early echo (pun intended) of your sonos speaker listening to you for Amazon.
posted by q*ben at 4:54 PM on August 29, 2022

If that's the case, explain that old clock radio I had, where moving your hand near it would change the station.
Not as a design feature, but as a thereminic 'hey look - it's tuned to 98.1, right? [reaches out] - now it's playing 98.3, [retracts hand], back to 98.1 again'.
Everything's a potential theremin if you're a little kid who suspects that maybe they have superpowers.
posted by bartleby at 5:16 PM on August 29, 2022 [6 favorites]

Maybe your clock radio was just ahead of its time
posted by BungaDunga at 6:19 PM on August 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Linus Å mixes the technically difficult with the extremely silly. This is good

If you're needing more theremin silliness, Sean “Said the Gramophone” Michaels' novel Us Conductors novel is an alternative history of Lev Termen.
posted by scruss at 6:57 PM on August 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

I just thought this would be a fun thing about turning a C64 into a theremin, I didn't realize that fundamental principles of electronics that have eluded me for years were suddenly going to be made clear. Neat!
posted by Foosnark at 7:19 PM on August 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

This video was great, I enjoyed the little bits of humor and the fairly understandable presentation.

I hope Linus will do some more pieces on this instrument in the future.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 5:09 AM on August 30, 2022

That animation of electrons flowing through a wire is excellent, I might use it in class...
posted by subdee at 6:07 AM on August 30, 2022

I didn't realize that fundamental principles of electronics that have eluded me for years were suddenly going to be made clear.

Agreed. For example - I know how a 555 works and why but that part specifically really grabbed my attention. He talks about the principles without just saying it's magic, but also while actually explaining them so they're understandable. It's quite a skill. I wish he was around when I didn't know how a 555 works and just put it in circuits because the schematics said so.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 7:38 AM on August 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is excellent! Since theremins are so simple, there's a sort of competition or desire to build them out of fewer and fewer components, which resulted in this incredible single component theremin, using only a ATtiny microcontroller and some wires.
posted by wesleyac at 7:54 AM on August 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

I wish he was around when I didn't know how a 555 works

I was lucky enough to be a teenage electronics hobbyist when the 555 was first released. There was a whole article about it in Electronics Today International, a real dead-trees magazine that I had a subscription to the Australian edition of. So I got to know exactly how they worked before I ever put one in a circuit.

First thing I did with a 555 was use one to drive a 2N3055 power transistor and burn out the first decent speaker I'd ever owned. Good times.
posted by flabdablet at 12:41 PM on August 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

If we don't redesign all appliances to also be theramins the terrorists win.

Ha! IoT now stands for Internet of Theramins in my mind
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 1:25 PM on August 30, 2022

On watching, that's a nicely done vid, cheers for sharing. Will check out the other links too. I was a Sinclair Spectrum kid and it's easy to forget that the 8-bit "microcomputers" were all designed to be able to do a lot more than just play games on
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 1:45 PM on August 30, 2022

He's likely using a pair of TLC551s: they have much lower voltage requirements than 555s. He said he was using "low voltage CMOS", or words to that effect
posted by scruss at 2:24 PM on August 30, 2022