For many fans of digital music, nothing beats the synthetic sound of a MIDI-based tune. This Lo-Fi Orchestra project was created by maker and musician John Miles of John Miles Music . It uses multiple Arduino boards and one of our favorite SBCs, the Raspberry Pi Pico .

The Arduinos are programmed to generate sound featuring a variety of effects. The Pico is mainly used to provide visual output for the audio as it plays out in real-time.

There are multiple types of Arduinos integrated into the system including Arduino Nanos and Arduino Unos. Miles has created special components for synthesizing different instruments and breaks down the construction of each one in this blog post on his official website.

The Pico creates visual output using a Pimoroni Unicorn Pack —a module consisting of a small, programmable matrix of LEDs. This isn’t the first Pico Miles has tinkered with as we also stumbled across this Pico-based multi MIDI router .

To see this project in action, check out the demo video shared to YouTube by John Miles Music and be sure to follow him for future creations. While the music was written by John Miles, a maker named Kevin ( @diyelectromusic) created and programmed the project.