Brian Eno's The Fat Lady of Limbourg for the Raspberry Pi

"Here's an updated version of Eno's favourite chubby girl, but rendered with a slimline synthesis model. All in an attempt to get this runnable on a single Raspberry Pi. This uses the non-oversampled synth, so everything is computed at 44.1kHz. It's using the newer variant of the BPCVO model, and I've redone all the synth presets to remove the filter on everything pitched to eliminate that particular computation burden. And there are tricks you can play to bring back a 'filtery' sound - for example, morphing from sin to saw or sin to square sounds like a filter opening up as harmonics get introduced, and that trick has been exploited to turn the pair of 'Brass' into pure 1980s digital filter-free synthesis. But despite the trick (early ramp via EG to morph from sin to saw, giving a harmonic enrichening over the first 100ms or so of the sound) you simply can't replace a filter with tricks, so the sounds do suffer as a result. But hey, no free lunches here, the goal was to make it burn less CPU and still get a decent sound. So the 'Fat Lady' bass has also gone filterless, ditto the Warm Jets 'guitar', ditto Phil's Wiggly Manzanera. The percussive elements remain filtered as they just have to be, they rely on the resonant filter to generate anything at all apart from hissy noise.

But after the filter removal and the performance tuning, this version now runs in exactly 24% of an iPad 2. It may actually run on a Pi in this form. Really, there is a damn good chance that £20 of woefully underpowered educational computer will be able to synthesize this in real time, without resorting to a Pocket Orchestra. Bear in mind, 'this' is now 14 notes of polyphony, many stereo delays (seven? eight??), a global reverb and 10 separate synths.

Audio was captured from the iPad and not processed in any way, these are exactly the bytes that I computed. Cool, eh? Plus, big bonus, you get the Eerie Noise - which is actually a combination of a dedicated 'Eerie Noise' synth and the pair of brasses, turned way down and pitch bent to buggery. Yay!

Next step - get this codebase rebuilt on a Pi and actually run it."

And the original: