You can compare this Nebulophone to the Stylophone that was re-released a few years ago, but that’s not really doing it justice. They can both be used to produce some retrorrific electronic music, but the Nebulophone is built on an Arduino so it’s compact and, well I’m just going to come out and say it, adorable.

It does require some electronics know-how since you have to build it yourself, like soldering and stripping wires and what-not. But because it came from your hands the final product will be all the more satisfying to play. As you can see it even has a tiny keyboard, but improves on the Stylophone with additional settings and dials for changing the waveform (ramp, triangle, square, pulse or noise), adjusting the decay, switching between major and chromatic keyboard mapping, arpeggio modes and three speed settings of portamento. Yeah, all that stuff. The only things you have to provide are a 9-volt battery, a speaker and talent. $54.99 from ThinkGeek.

For reasons inexplicable, a “Today I Learned” thread on Reddit has turned into a treatise on how to make Google Translate beatbox for you, among other things. It must have taken some intense experimentation for Redditor Harrichr to get here but he somehow stumbled upon the following combination of steps.

    1) Go to Google Translate
    2) Set the translator to translate German to German
    3) Copy + paste the following into the translate box: pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch
    4) Click “listen”
    5) Be amazed :)

Since the original post both the thread and meme have expanded into slight tweaks and variations, including Technocopter, Helicopter and Dubstep. YCombinator user iamdave actually posted a guide to making your own beats:

    zk = suspended cymbal
    bschk = snare
    pv = brush
    bk = bass
    tk = flam1
    vk = roll tap
    kt = flam2
    kttp = flam tap
    krp = hi hat tap
    pv = short roll
    th = better hi hat
    thp, ds = instant rimshot.

While I’m not 100% sure how exactly this is working, it seems like a peculiarity of the German translation setup in Google Translate is allowing for playing consonants in a way that sounds like drums. Or, more specifically, a delightful way that sounds like drums.