I suspect this could be done with a fast (16..32 MHz) Atmel or ARM with a DAC - easy to create an arbitrary waveform generator ... bandit

Post : Reverse engineering a Stylophone
URL : http://hackaday.com/2012/07/22/reverse-engineering-a-stylophone/
Posted : July 22, 2012 at 8:01 am
Author : Brian Benchoff
Tags : reverse engineering, stylophone
Categories : musical hacks

http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/sty.png

The Stylophone - a musical toy from the 60s - is a surprisingly simple piece of engineering. With a simple metallic keyboard played with a stylus and just a handful of transistors, the Stylophone was able to produce a few marvelous for their time sounds, and is the equivalent of a pre-[Stradivarius] violin for the electronic music scene. [Simon] tore apart an original Stylophone (http://www.waitingforfriday.com/index.php/Reverse_Engineering_the_Stylophone) , and did a complete teardown of the circuit, going over the ins and outs of why this ancient noise box is so cool.

There have been quite a few DIY Stylophone clones, but all of them suffered from the same raspy sound made by a 555 timer chip slightly misguided makers used (http://hackaday.com/2010/09/23/analog-stylophone/) instead of the relaxation oscillator (in the pic seen above) used in the original. Aside from the oscillator connect to the RC circuit of the metallic keyboard, [Simon] also looked into the vibrato circuit. This is just a simple oscillator producing an 8 Hz sine-ish wave. The keyboard, of course, is connected to the circuit with an array of resistors which [Simon] happily provided the values for.

[Simon] put up a schematic (http://www.waitingforfriday.com/index.php/File:Reverse_Engineered_Stylophone_Diagram.png) of his reverse engineered Stylophone, allowing you to clone this ancient electronic instrument. If you can source the transistors, that is.

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