Assignment: Synthesis: Music Instrument (group work)

Collaborators: katalene, naryasece, ashley

Description:
In this project, we created a musical instrument that explores the question of what it might be like to stretch a sound.  We created two instruments, each of which consists of 2 rubber bands that can be pulled by a player.  Each instrument is made for a single player -- it is simple to hold and to manipulate using one or two arms, and it is easy to understand what can be manipulated.

Using one of the instruments, a user can change the pitch of the sound by pulling one rubber band.  The sound plays as a pulse.  Pulling on the second rubber band, the user can adjust the tempo of the sound.

In the second instrument, the rubber bands shift the pitch of the sound from different starting points -- one with a range in the higher frequencies, one with a range in the lower.

Two people can play the two instruments simultaneously -- this outputs a sound that is function of all of the inputs, but not clearly one or the other.

Components:

• Arduino
• rubber bands
• FSRs (4)
• piezo speaker
• wood
• pipe
• wing nuts (4)
• zip ties (4)

Video/Images:

Conclusions/Observations:

We attempted to map different relationships between force and sound played -- both to try out intuitive mappings for "stretching sound" and to find mappings that could express behaviors of different kinds of functions in sound.  We tried mapping a logarithmic function to one FSR -- which created a quick increase in pitch and then a slow increase when the rubber band was pulled.  We tried mapping an exponential function -- which created a very quick increase in pitch.  We also tried mappying a sine function -- this created a sound with a pitch that gradually decreased, increased, decreased, and increased when the rubber band was pulled.  We chose the mappings that we are presenting in class because they are the most clear mappings.

In designing these instruments, we found that creating the initial design for an instrument that could allow a user to use stretching rubber to input information into a computer was straightforward using our FSRs, but that thinking of mappings of sounds to stretching was more difficult.