How do I find a chip?

I'm hoping to find a chip that I can use to generate simple musical
notes. I can live with simple square or sine wave tones, but would
love to find something that does selectable voice timbre synthesis (FM
synthesis?). A MIDI chip would totally be the thing I think. I need
something that I can drive from a microcontroller and it needs to
support multiple simultaneous notes (chords).

I've tried searching Google but I'm not even sure what to search for.

Can anyone A) suggest a part that does what I am looking for, or B)
give me a suggestion what to search for? I'm happy to do the research
(half the fun!)

TIA

- Joel

 

This might interest you:
http://www.fee.vutbr.cz/~arnost/opl/opl3.html

michael brown

 

Search for "top octave generator" chips.

Cheers!

Chip Shults
My robotics, space and CGI web page - http://home.cfl.rr.com/aichip

 

Can't help you with the synthesis, but a simple solution for square
wave tones is a PICAXE. It's basically a PIC micro with bootstrap
code pre-loaded. The idea is that it's simple to write and upload
programs. They have some pretty cool features, one of which is the
command "SOUND" which automatically generates a square wave output.

the sytax is; SOUND pin,(note, duration, note, duration...)

notes can be any value fro 0-255. 0 is silent, 1-127 are tones,
128-255 are white noise.

duration is also 0-255, multiples of 12ms.

a simple program that just beeps once might be;

main:
sound 0,(100,100)
end

check out the PICAXE system here; www.picaxe.co.uk

nifty

 

That will give you the 2^-12 intervals
and they (organ manufacturers) use flip-flops to give octave intervals from there,
but TOGs don't do any wave-shaping.

 

--------------
Speech synthesis isn't that hard to do analog using a micro to control
it, if you're interested. Search on "Voder". Or email me, I have
collected a bunch of projects.

-Steve