Looking Outwards 4

Weather Thingy, Adrien Kaeser, 2018

The Weather Thingy is a custom made sound controller that uses climate events to control the settings of the musical instrument. The piece has 2 parts,
one being a weather station on a tripod microphone, and one being a sound controller connected to the weather station. The station senses wind with an anemometer, rain, and brightness. The station turns this data into “midi data” which can be understood by instruments.

Adrian wanted to make the instrument play live based on the current climate, and have the weather affect the melodies. For example, if the weather station measures rain, the chorus of the melody will change. If the weather station measures wind, the pan of the music will change.

The project used hardware including environmental sensors, weather meters, SparkFun MIDI Shield, encoder rotary knobs, Arduino mega, and Arduino Ienardo. Software that was used in the creation included C++. MIDI protocol, and Arduino.