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Apple Music Hall Opening Battersea Power Station

Apple Music Hall’s 600 Seat Spatial Stage Opens at Battersea Power Station

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Apple Music Hall Opening Battersea Power Station
Battersea Power Station has loomed over the Thames since Giles Gilbert Scott finished the last of its brick towers in 1955, a coal plant so large it later sat empty for decades and still owes half its fame to the inflatable pig Pink Floyd parked between the chimneys for the 1977 Animals sleeve. Apple already keeps its its UK headquarters and a store inside the redeveloped complex. On September 28, 2026 the company adds Apple Music Hall, a 600-seat room built to stage a concert, lock a Spatial Audio mix, and send a multicamera feed around the world from the same night.

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Playable Guitar No Neck Body Aircraft Cable

Burls Art Built a Playable Guitar With No Neck or Body Using Aircraft Cable and a Bed Frame

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Playable Guitar No Neck Body Aircraft Cable
Burl of Burls Art wondered how far you could strip a guitar before it stopped being one. He pulled the neck off, then placed the remains on tensioned aviation cable and attempted to play the creation. The experiment began as a side question when he was working on another project in his newly constructed garage. He kept going until he was left with only the Telecaster’s hardware, six strings, and a row of metal bars.

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Jonathon Rowny MP3 Player Tape Deck

Jonathan Rowny Built an MP3 Player That Only Plays on Tape Decks

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Jonathon Rowny MP3 Player Tape Deck
Jonathan Rowny has been feeling nostalgic again, and this time the answer is a cassette that holds no magnetic tape. His player looks like a mixtape, fits a standard deck, and stays silent until the mechanism starts to turn. Songs live on a microSD card inside the shell. Sound leaves through a real tape head pressed against the deck’s own head, so the old machine treats digital files as if they were oxide sliding past at walking speed.

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Hammond Organ Project Build

Custom Hammond Organ Boasts Hand-Cranked Tonewheels and Twelve Keys That Sing Through Steel

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Hammond Organ Project Build
Uri Tuchman decided a musician friend needed a present that could actually make noise. He chose the Hammond organ, that old electromechanical machine whose spinning iron disks and magnetic coils once filled churches and stages with pure tones. Instead of a full console, he built a single octave version he could turn by hand. The result sits somewhere between a careful reconstruction and a living demonstration of how sound can come from metal moving past a coil.

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Guitar-Playing Robot MegCell Pulse

Six Years of Quiet Work Built a Pair of Robots That Make an Acoustic Guitar Play Itself, Called MegCell Pulse

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Guitar-Playing Robot MegCell Pulse
After long evenings spent designing mechanisms and calibrating movement, a New Zealand engineer named Bruce finished a system that mounts directly onto an ordinary acoustic guitar and turns digital tablature into live string vibration. He calls it MegCell Pulse. Two coordinated robots handle the work of human hands. One presses the strings against the frets. The other plucks them with six individual plectrums. The sound that reaches the room is the actual instrument speaking, complete with the body resonance and the space around it.

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Casio Rapman First Rap Keyboard 1991

Fascinating Look Back at Casio Rapman, the 1991 Keyboard That Put a Full Rap Crew on Your Desk

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Casio Rapman First Rap Keyboard 1991
In 1991 hip-hop had moved from the margins into living rooms and shopping malls. MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice filled charts, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air played on television, and kids everywhere wanted to sound like the records. Casio answered with a plastic keyboard that claimed to do nearly everything a working rap group needed. They called it the Rapman, model RAP-1, and marketed it as the world’s first keyboard built specifically for rap.

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N64 Synth Controller Cartridge Portable Synthesizer Instrument

An Old N64 Controller Becomes a Portable Synthesizer with the Synth Controller Cartridge

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N64 Synth Controller Cartridge Portable Synthesizer Instrument
Chicago-based maker Thomas McDonagh built Console Pedals around a simple but unusual idea. Guitar effects live inside cartridges shaped like N64 game paks. A compact 3D-printed base unit accepts up to two of those cartridges at once, handles power and audio routing, and lets players swap sounds without touching cables. Battery operation removes one more thing to plug in during a session. The Synth Controller Cartridge sits in that same lineup yet does something different. It reads button presses and stick movements from a connected N64 controller, then turns those actions into real synthesized notes that exit through the base unit’s audio jack. No Nintendo console ever enters the picture. The cartridge supplies the sound engine and controller interface while the base supplies power, mixing options if desired, and a standard quarter-inch output ready for an amp or recording gear.

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Love Hulten Magicos-2 Playable Pink Floyd Prism Guitar

First Look at Love Hultén’s Magicos-2, a Pink Floyd Prism Guitar You Can Actually Play

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Love Hulten Magicos-2 Playable Pink Floyd Prism Guitar
Swedish designer Love Hultén accepted a private commission with an unusual request. Turn the flat triangle from Pink Floyd’s most famous album cover into a guitar that someone can actually pick up and play. Hultén already held a reputation for instruments that borrow strong visual references and then make them functional. Past projects include synthesizers shaped like Darth Vader helmets, compact keyboards styled after old game hardware, and other pieces that treat electronics as three-dimensional objects rather than hidden components. The new instrument, called the Magicos-2, continues that pattern while answering a direct challenge: keep the prism shape intact and still deliver real musical response.

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