Years ago Max Mahoney (Chemistry) and I did some work with Chladni plates, but ended up breaking the speaker motor we were using. Lately I’ve been dreaming of different ways to visualize sound as part of ongoing data sonification efforts, so I knocked together a little prototype using a Bluetooth transmitter connected to the modular synth:
and a little Bluetooth speaker driver thing:
Nothing spectacular, but the sand did indeed dance!
We’ve been doing a bunch of work and prototyping in data sonification, for example playing weather data on music boxes, and building out a modular synth rig to provide realtime sound of sensor data. Max Mahoney (Chemistry) has been a key partner in the work, and has ideas about how we might sonify various chemical processes. The other day, we had the opportunity to do a rough prototype of sonifying liquid color change.
The first prototype (above) involved simply adding food coloring to a beaker of water, and using the ADDAC 308 module to transform light data to CV, which when fed to the modular synth lowers the frequency of the audible sine wave. The second prototype involved more carefully controlling the light by placing the apparatus in a box, sticking a battery + LED on the outside of the beaker, and poking a hole in the side of the box for the light sensor and another in the top so we could use a syringe to introduce the food coloring. Here’s version 2:
Lots yet to do, but we think we’ve got a functional prototype that Max intends to use in the classroom this semester.
We’ve been developing a Quantified College initiative, in an effort to gather and represent lots of data at a variety of scales, macro to micro. The plan is to collect as much data as possible, from weather to the microbiome of the college, and then explore ways to represent those data while providing students with hands-on experiences. A big part of the plan is data sonification, using low tech means – music box mechanisms – and high-tech ones – a Eurorack synth we’re in the process of building out. Faculty, staff, and a student prototyped the former during our most recent Maker Wednesday session, using wind data from a weather station we recently installed outside the Innovation Center. Diane Carlson (Sociology) transferred the wind graph to the piano roll-style music box card…
…which sounded like this:
Here’s what it sounded like inverted (with the roll upside down, resulting in the higher pitched notes becoming lower pitched ones, and vice versa):