Developer Johan von Konow let us know about Leet AI, a new modular, open-source synthesizer that he’s created, with “AI-powered inspiration”.
Leet AI is designed to be small, playful, and stackable, so you can build your own “miniature orchestra” of wireless synth units, each representing a different instrument.
“Many synthesizers are powerful (and complicated) all-in-one units that can do almost anything,” he notes. “I wanted to test the opposite, where several units (one for each instrument) work together as an orchestra.”
“It’s still an early-stage concept, but fully functional and ready for others to build, fork, or improve,” he adds. “I think your readers would enjoy it, especially those interested in creative coding, music tech, or experimental AI tools.”
Features:
- Cute, small, playful and cheap design (so you can have one for each instrument)
- Open source and customizable (programmed in python with COTS modules)
- Easy to use (the display shows current mode and options – no need for strange key combinations)
- Wireless communication and battery powered
- AI enabled (so it can generate new melodies for inspiration)
- Built on CircuitPython (ESP32-S2)
- Syncs wirelessly via ESP-Now
- Hackable via USB (mounts as a USB drive)
Specifications:
- 86 x 60 x 15 mm (smaller than a deck of cards)
- 16 keys with RGB LEDs
- Powerful microprocessor running circuit python (ESP32-S2)
- 1.8” color display (160×128 pixels)
- 1000mAh rechargeable LiPo battery
- High quality 112dB SNR DAC
- Low latency wireless communication (ESP-now)
- MIDI in/out over USB-C
- 2 rotational magnetic encoders with dual tilt navigation
Availability:
Leet AI is freely available now, as an advanced DIY project. See the following links for details;
Meh, looks like an object destined for the landfill. You can do this way cheaper and more conveniently with your phone. Hell, Logic Pro has generative playing with all sorts of expressiveness levels, timing, style, etc. Save your money.
And at what point do you realize that you didn’t create anything but are merely a curator? Can you feel fulfilled by using purely generative methods? The line is blurry though – if you came up with a generative patch, you would feel differently about it compared to something you did not come up with. But, how many will lie to themselves?
You think all these phones and tablets don’t end up in landfills?
Reduce, reuse, recycle. Reduce superfluous purchases and use what you already have: a phone, tablet, computer, or your existing gear.
I agree. The level of infantilism surrounding anything AI, and unfortunately very present in the electronic music instruments community, marketing, etc, is terrifying. I agree that this is a landfill ready item.
“The level of infantilism surrounding anything AI, and unfortunately very present in the electronic music instruments community, marketing, etc, is terrifying. ”
Isn’t the ‘infantilism’ on the part of the musicians triggered by the term ‘AI’?
This project looks like Pocket Operators on steroids – inexpensive, powerful and fun. Lots of electronic musicians are interested in instruments like this.
AI is just a tool and people can choose to use it or not. In this case, nobody is forcing it on you and it’s just one one aspect of the platform.
At least this project is open source too. People can learn from it, hopefully.
I’m glad you mentioned Teenage Engineering. Do you know that their OP-1 device was originally designed for kids? It’s just that they realized there’s lots of adults with kid mentality who’d spend thousands of $$$ for a toy so it ended up being marketed for them instead. Look at the interface, the cow, the monkey drummer, the etch-a-sketch sequencer, etc, etc. Don’t even get me started with pocket operators.
I kind of like all the cute graphics. We have so many professional all-black music tools already – let them be whimsical. I think one of the pocket operator graphics designed was done by a daughter of one of the TE employees too.
You’ve made this up but even if you hadn’t, which you did, Kraftwerk used a literal calculator to make music and plenty of artists have used the OP-1 professionally.
Comparing Kraftwerk to the likes of the toy OP-1 very funny lol
Way to miss the point.
Don’t get me wrong its a great toy, bought one for my 13yo niece
Agreed, many israeli psy-trance artists use the OP-1
This is a ridiculous amount of hate for an open-sourced project that has a estimated BOM of 24 dollars. Kudos to the creator who took the time to share what they built.
Exactly. Welcome to the Synthtopia comment section!
It’s everywhere.
The worst part of the Internet is that it’s empowered angry, hateful people.
They are obsessed with spreading hate and they imagine their opinions to be a lot more important than they really are. They end up degrading all online forums. Facebook and X are the worst now.
We live in a time where electronic musicians have more incredible options than ever before. To the haters, though, everything sucks and everyone else is stupid for not realizing it.
Criticism isn’t hatred.
That depends where you live, try to criticize god in Afghanistan and i guarantee you they will take that as hatred
Just swinging by synthtopia to drop some casual Islamophobia in the comments?
Trying to make a point about criticism, And where did i mention islam? Havent you heard about the ancient god Giwish
it is if all you are doing is trashing the thing you are criticizing. there is constructive and destructive criticizing and most of what you see here is the latter
Not picking up anything with AI in the name whether it uses it or not.
Totally agree.
Music is something that needs to have a soul.
The way AI works right now has to do with cloning and repetition of patterns or schemes. Those more successful and or weighted in a matrix.
Some musical genres will be more tolerant to this non-sense but in the end, human talent and sentiment is unbeatable.
Not that today’s music is much better than what AI is going to offer, but at least it takes more time to make it. A song now needs a couple of weeks and a reduced group of humans. AI is going to make it easier and faster to iterate and reduce the need of humans to just one (the one making the prompt).
Can someone explain to a non-coder – is Circuitpython like, Python for FPGA, or a virtual circuit behavior thing? Or does it just have the word circuit in it.
It’s just a word. It’s based off MicroPython which is designed to run on micro-controllers. Circuitpython is based on MicroPython and makes it easier for beginners to get up and running on programming hardware and gives a bunch of extra modules.
While I can’t directly relate to building my own open-source instrument, the hate is Stoopid™. There are numerous approaches. That’s why its called ‘synthesis.’ After a certain point, I can’t really name the source of a sound and neither can you. This will either be a creativity-jogger for people who normally play fancier gear or a good starter for noobs. Leet deserves a place in a rig as much as a Volca or an effects pedal.
Besides, I don’t need Facebook or Twiddle, just a small high-pass filter for reading Synthtopia. 😛
Someone who knows how to contact Tats in Berlin needs to connect him with Johan von Konow. This could have been (could be) the the next NTS: NTS-AI.
For anyone who cares — The Korg NTS was supposed to be hackable hardware using open source code to generate new waveforms to run with the minimal NTS interface. It wasn’t. It relied on a complex IDE toolchain setup that could only be understood by older programmers who knew docker, Linux, and C or younger professional embedded controller engineers — not for the vast number of young, clever, creative Python coders. The hardware documentation for the NTS was scant with a lousy limited pinout. The code was, to be kind, not well documented. USB driver errors made it hard to load the files. And the GitHub was versioned in a very non-standard way. Kudos to the developers who have been able to use it, but not many did.
Von Konow’s design is the exact opposite of that. This is an exceptionally well-documented project (hardware kicad, software python with versioned dependent libraries, error-checking, and a structure that places the heavy lifting in the background so that anyone could fiddle with a couple files and get an interesting result). The design is cute. It might look better with a medieval silkscreen ala TE, but the screens easily customized with bmp files loaded via adafruit’s image load. Replace one bmp file and you get a new screen. Nice. As this is based on CircuitPython, it is easily coded using many simple interfaces and loaded over USB. All the cool kids are doing it.
Why should Tats care? Imagine if the NTS was a surface-mount chip on a board that had a place for a Teensy or Feather? The easily-programmed Teensy or Feather would include C-python binaries for interacting directly with the Korg proprietary chip AI. The python chip becomes a loader for the sound and config files for the NTS chip. Imagine if the NTS had exposed pinouts, easily accessible with solid, open-source documentation. Make the circuit board so that the entire assembly can be removed from any enclosure and people could 3D print their own designs using the available files.
The kicker here is that this guy has figured out how to “embed” AI by not embedding it. He offloads the AI to a server to run the heavy compute and brings back the results to the python-based chip. In the words of Montell Jordan, “This is how we do it.” The NTS-AI could be set up to connect with MS’s own getmusic, just like von Konow is doing. You could send local waveforms from the NTS-AI to a server for some advanced musical digital twin modeling, perhaps send a midi melody with the timbre information to the cloud and return associated timbre-specific counterpoint midi loops WITH the novel timbre data. Think partnership with MS or Intel’s own AI (used now in Audacity).
I could go on, but this guy has figured this out for you Tats and, with his day-job training in cyber security, you have to imagine he can help to make NTS-AI secure so that only the data you want leaving your rig is the data you want to send it.
Now, if I had $100K USD, I would just hire this guy myself. We would build it, sell it, and the next time you saw it would be on the desktop where Billy Eilish is mixing her next record. But I don’t have the cash.
Tats, if I may call you that, sir — think about how happy Korg corporate would be — and then the two of you can go and make anything you want. NTS-AI: A smarter synth that fits in your pocket. There, you don’t even have to spend time with the marketing folks, That’s for free from me. NTS-AI: A smarter synth that fits in your pocket.
Haters gone hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, but I read through the GitHub, Tats. Cash money, Tats. Money sitting right there on the table. NTS-AI. And then you can make DSP wind chimes for me because I actually want that, too.
Really, someone tell Tats to call this guy. Please.
Nice work, von Konow. Good job.
16 buttons and two knobs and this isn’t an app because…? What bothers me more is the statement: you can get multiple of them. Let’s be honest, that this works if you buy one or two at max of a series like the Volcas, Pockys or Rolcas. If you buy more, it gets stupid because the overall cost, the in-convenience factor and the then not so small anymore-setup could have bought you a mid or even higher tier synth or groovebox.
Pro tip: get Groove Rider 2 with a (used) iPad if you want some fun, powerful and overall music creation tool, instead of these hardware gimmicks.