Someone left a big chunk of gutter drain pipe in the garbage, and a sturdy wooden handle, just for me.
instrument-a-day 18: garbage drainpipe
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Category Archives: photoblog
instrument-a-day 17: wooden strings & rattles
I lasercut some strips of poplar for another project, and found that the waste wood could be plucked like guitar strings. The strips make pretty good rattles too.
instrument-a-day 16: light sensor
It's just a photodiode, a 9-volt battery, and a little amplifier, but it makes the vibrations in artificial light audible. A lot of what you hear is derived from 60Hz AC power, but electronic displays have tones of their own.
instrument-a-day 15: piano scanner
Scanning a handheld magnetic pickup back and forth over the piano strings makes a pretty neat sound. I may try attaching a rail on which the pickup can slide back and forth.
The pickup is plugged into an ordinary guitar amp.
Plug: Fun with Sensors workshop this Saturday at NYC Resistor!
instrument-a-day 14: corn music
I’ve always thought the patterns on corncobs looked like player piano rolls. So I wrote a program that watches a slowly-turning corncob. Whenever a particularly dark kernel crosses the centerline of the image, it plays a note corresponding to the height.
You can download the Processing code from moonmilk.com/11/02/cornscan.txt.
instrument-a-day 13: garbage garbage can lid
On the way to SHARE last night, I
packed a contact microphone and drumsticks but no instrument, telling
myself I’d find something in the garbage on the way there. What I
found was this nice metal garbage can lid.
packed a contact microphone and drumsticks but no instrument, telling
myself I’d find something in the garbage on the way there. What I
found was this nice metal garbage can lid.
laser whistles
These are some of the whistles made by participants in this afternoon’s laser whistle workshop at NYC Resistor.
There’s still two workshops left in the noisy noise series!
instrument-a-day 12: failed box xylophone
It doesn’t really work. I put it into the scrap wood bin.
instrument-a-day 11: ice smash!
Found a beautiful cracked frozen puddle in the park and flung some ice around.
instrument-a-day 10: fish whistle
Practice for Saturday’s laser whistle workshop. It’s cut from 1/4″ poplar. I won’t post the cutting plan until I figure out why only one of its two whistles is hooting and fix the problem!
