Artist Balam Soto has been making interactive projects for years. This is his latest: Exp.Inst.Rain, a wavering, touch-controlled instrument.
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Not everyone can agree on what good music is, but in some cases you’ll find that just about everyone can agree on what is awful. That’s what the people over at Neo-Pangea discovered when they were listening to Internet radio. When one of those terrible songs hits their collective eardrums, the group’s rage increases and they just need to skip the track.
Rather than use a web app or simple push button to do the trick, they turned the “skip” button into a NERF target. They call their creation the Boom Box Blaster and made a fantastic demo film video about it which is found after the break.
Inspired by a painting in the office, the target takes the form of a small hot air balloon. The target obviously needed some kind of sensor that can detect when it is hit by a NERF dart. The group tried several different sensor types, but eventually settled on a medium vibration sensor. This sensor is connected to an Arduino, which then communicates with a Raspberry Pi over a Serial connection. The Pi uses a Python script to monitor the Arduino’s vibration sensor. The system also includes some orange LEDs to simulate flames and a servo attached to the string which suspends the balloon from the ceiling. Whenever a hit is registered, the flames light up and the balloon raises into the air to indicate that the shot was on target.
The Pi was required in order to interface with the group’s streaming music service of choice; Sonos. The Sonos API made it easy for the team to interface their target with the “skip track” function. They just wrote a Node.js script that runs on the Pi and sends the proper command as necessary. Now whenever the radio asks the group if they want to build a snowman, they can all answer with a resounding, “no!”. They just need to make sure they have enough ammo to spare. Be sure to check out the comical demonstration video on the project page.
Arduino user named Muiota shared with us an experimental DIY music project running on Arduino Uno and solenoids.
Take a look at the video to hear how it sounds:
We are happy to announce Tsunami by Arachnid Labs has joined the Arduino At Heart Program.
Tsunami is a new powerful and flexible signal generator built on the Arduino platform and the best way to get started experimenting with analog signals.
Nick Johnson, its creator, took the versatile processor behind the Arduino Leonardo, and combined it with a Direct Digital Synthesis chip, which makes generating analog signals incredibly straightforward. He also added flexible input and output circuitry, an easy to use software library, to make working with analog signals as easy as blinking an LED.
Tsunami lowers the barriers to making music, sending and receiving data, experimenting amateur radio, and creating educational applications. It was launched successfully on KickStarter last April and you are in time to pre-order it on Crowd Supply!
Here’s a list of projects you could do:
Want to know more? Meet Nick and Tsunami in this video:
A science teacher at Bundang management high school 20 kilometers southeast of downtown Seoul, South Korea, involved his students in an Arduino Music project running Arduino Uno, Sparkfun Music Instrument Shield and Makey Makey.
Students started studying the principles of sensors and then built their own music instruments using recycled materials. Finally they played them as you can see from the video he shared with us:
See more pictures and videos at this link.
On a cold winter night in Kongsberg Norway, dancers draped in white sheets stand in a warm auditorium waiting to hear their mark. As the mark arrives, each dancer hits a button and is instantly lit up with 136 RGB LEDs. The dancers move fluidly across the stage in sync […]
Cata Sopros is interactive sound installation running on Arduino Uno and created by Elas Duas, a multidisciplinary studio based in the city of Guimarães (Portugal). If you translate the title from portuguese it means: Breathe Catchers. In fact the project is a collective musical instrument made with paper windmills transforming the users’ breathe into sounds:
The windmills have inbuilt electret microphones that were connected to an Arduino Uno. The sensor data was then sent to MaxMSP and the sounds were played with Ableton Live. The video was shot at the cloister of the beautiful Alberto Sampaio museum in Guimarães, Portugal.
Enjoy the video:
TEMPO, TEMPO! is a piece of kinetic art in the form of a metronome with an audible spark. Or, according to creator Sanela Jahić, it’s “a kinetic object which form a narrative about accelerating the production process and enhancing work performance in order to increase competitiveness and improve profits.” […]
ANGLE project is a Florence-based duo and also the name of the amazing audiovisual performance that applies videomapping techniques to live sets. The duo produces and composes all the songs with synchronised video images using 3D mapping on a self-supporting, isostatic, modular structure that is made up of triangles with junctions at their vertices.
TETRA 02 is the title of ANGLE’s new live set composed of a structure equipped with LED lights, animated live using Arduino Uno & Mad Light.
The Moog Werkstatt-Ø1 is a patchable, 100% little analog synthesizer whose design is based on classic Moog circuits. It was created as an educational tool for teaching electronics assembly and analog circuit design. Recently a series of tutorial projects appeared on Werkstatt website, featuring the use of the Arduino Uno to mod and create effects using different sensors and components:
We used the Arduino UNO R3 for all mods, and the Moog Werkstatt Arduino Library was written specifically for it. Other micro-controllers with similar bootloaders (Teesnsy, Seeeduino, etc) have not been tested but could work. The Arduino features a USB interface, 6 analog input pins, and 14 digital I/O pins.
The 5 tutorials have also series of videos that demo each mod. For example, they integrated an accelerometer to measure movement in three dimensions:
And they added an arpeggiator/sequencer function: