Spinning flower sings Mozart!
A hastily-constructed Max patch reads a midi file and turns it into rotation speeds for the motorized flower. Based on the wooden synthesizer and an idea by John Glover.
You can actually see the motor seize up when it tries to hit the high note the second time.
A very large doorbell, made out of stuff lying around the studio.
A labor-saving device for percussionists who have to play Michael Gordon’s Timber
A horrible, horrible version of Thelonious Monk’s Friday the 13th played on wooden synthesizer.
(This is a cheat – I didn’t make the synthesizer today. Actually, I recorded the song a few days ago too.)
Light goes past the waving cat and bounces off the shiny spinning wheel to the sensor. I cut holes in the wheel to approximate a major scale in just intonation.
It works better with light passing through the holes, but the reflection is more fun.
Inspired by yesterday’s LED candle with a hidden song, I set up an arduino to transmit 16 different notes on 16 LEDs simultaneously. (The notes are laid out like the bass keys of an accordion, though you can’t really tell.)
The optical receiver hears all the notes at once, unless you cover some of them up.
Bonus: the flickering LEDs do crazy things to a cell phone camera.
The underlying idea and the arduino code (available here) are nearly identical to the Jeltone from a few years ago, just transmitting the sound through light instead of skin conduction.
I plugged a little light sensor into an amplifier to hear invisible light modulation. One of my LED candles had a surprise.
Tell the motion planner to move the motors through distances that are related by just intonation ratios, and then the motors’ magnetic interferences should blend in a harmonious way. In theory.
a tiny homage to Steve Reich, using a tiny pair of headphones as a microphone plugged into a tiny amplifier.
Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music (1966): vimeo.com/65735964
I froze a contact microphone in a cup of water, and thawed it out again.