The Hackaday Belgrade 2018 badge (and its successor, the Hackaday Superconference 2018 badge) has a simple audio system driving a speaker with up to three simultaneous tones. In order to give the Nyan Cat animation an appropriate soundtrack, I’d need to reduce its YouTube soundtrack to a few simple notes. Fortunately, people who are more knowledgeable about music have already done the work and shared them in sheet music format.

But there was a big problem: neither [amybaldwindev] or I knew how to read music.

We did what anyone would do in this day and age: search for “How to read sheet music” and read the first link. For the purpose of this specific project, I was not concerned with understanding the notes on the staff as I only needed to match them up against the reference chart on the badge music page. The duration of each note, however, proved more challenging. On several occasions we thought a note sounded wrong but it turned out just to be their duration

We started with a piano adaptation, but several attempts at translating it to badge music format failed to create something that sounded like Nyan Cat. Eventually we switched to this version – intended for violin – whose translated result running on the badge sounded like we were on the right track.

(Cross-posted to Hackaday.io)