Octave generator
Electronic
7400, 7476

Have you ever heard some electronic music or read something about it?

You probably have — electronics is becoming very common in music today. Electronic circuits are being used to imitate the sound of various musical instruments or to create entirely new sounds.

Here's a Project that will let you see how some electronic musical instruments work. You can see from the schematic that this Project is made up of a NAND multivibrator and a J-K flip-flop divider circuit.

Using 3 position rotary switch, you "sample" the output from the multivibrator at three different points:

from the multivibrator itself, after it's been divided once and after it's been divided twice.

Yyou'll notice that each time the multivibrator's output has been divided, the sound you hear gets lower. You can further change the sound you hear by substituting a different capacitor for the 0.1 µF one used in the NAND multivibrator.

More complex electronic musical devices make use of several different multivibrator and divider circuits. The outputs from the multivibrators and dividers are combined in several different ways to produce unusual musical effects.

Can you think of any other circuits you've played with that could be used to produce music?