I wondered if anyone else had used calculators as music controllers. The answer? But of course. Here’s a classic Russian calculator model controlling arrangements in Ableton Live. It appears in this example as though this is working as a USB (QWERTY) keyboard substitute, rather than as a MIDI controller, but you get more of the same potential from all those wonderful buttons.

This find comes to us from Toyo Bunko of Noise.io – themselves lovers of mobile technology, having built a sophisticated soft synth for the iPhone. Toyo writes:

The page (in Russian) : http://diver.net.ua/page-id-124.html

And the video (instant download link) is here: http://diver.net.ua/page-id-124-a-dl.html

([Credited as] created by Zinus of "Diver Group").

The calculator model is Elektronika MK-52, it’s quite famous. More info on this calculator can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MK-52

He managed to connect the calculator via a USB interface which he took out from an old USB keyboard. So it basically acts like a keyboard controller.

If you’re out there, we’d love to hear more (or from anyone who can translate the Russian here). I expect I’m not the first to point to this, but the calculator music – by popular demand – continues!

It’s hard to write the first line of this, because in this case any reference to Kraftwerk’s “Pocket Calculator” is wildly redundant. This is a calculator. He is the operator. This is a real, working HP48 graphing calculator playing MIDI events. You can go, like, graph stuff with it afterwards, do some Calculus. And we can thank a few people responding in a mobile music poll on this site for making it happen.

Andrew Turley, who has previously built a microfiche MIDI machine (thus making his way through arcane academic equipment as MIDI controllers), describes the project:

This is a demo of a project I built so that I could use my HP 48 to play a MIDI keyboard. The calculator is running a program that sends data to a Parallax Stamp Basic microcontroller over the built-in serial port whenever I press a button. The microcontroller is running software that converts the message from the calculator into a MIDI noteon or noteoff message that is then sent to the keyboard. This is a response to a createdigitalmusic.com poll in which a (small) number of users said they wanted the site to cover more calculator music.

Brilliant work, Andrew. And I have to say, now that you’ve done it, it’s a pretty practical little object to us as a controller.

Other calculator work, anyone?