An ATMEL based Arduino is a bad choice for generating video, you probably can't do it. It just isn't fast enough. You can generate audio but you going to be limited by the limited amount of RAM and the lack of decent digital to analogue support. Also, due to the low speed of AVRs you won't be able to produce high fidelity sound.

I recommend that you check out Musical Applications of Microprocessors by Hal Chamberlin. The book was written back in the days of 8 bit micro processors and is one of the seminal books on the topic of creating sounds.

Basically, you create wave tables in RAM and cycle through them outputting the data through a DAC. Using wave tables you can achieve polyphony. Creating white and or pink noise is just a matter of creating the right data in your wave table.

I think an ARM based processor would be a much better choice for this application. You will have a proper amount of RAM, a much faster CPU and depending on the model, you will get a DAC.

u/c0wfunk · 2 points r/synthesizers

I'm working on one myself and have found some things around. Right now I've got a teensy and a big pile of electronics components to make the yusynth moog clone filter

yusynth has some good resources.

If you want to get deeper into the electronics, Aaron Lanterman's lectures on youtube are great..

Another book, from the same era, is Musical Applications of Microprocessors by Hal Chamberlin .. it's a little steep on Amazon but I was able to find it at my local University library

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