Dessert

Gabriel Prado and Emilie Zhou

Description

Our main intent for this musical instrument was to allow users to be able to change the rhythm produced by the sound of the marbles and motors. The final outcome is an instrument with three components producing different sounds and users can interact with two of those components. When the program first starts, the metronome attached to the left motor produces a short sequence of beats that indicates the start of the program. The right motor is connected to a wheel-like container and a photoreceptor sensor that controls the direction the wheel spins in. The wheel also has a track on it that holds marbles and makes another sound when the marbles hit each other. The motor produces a continuous sound as it spins but when it changes directions, it also makes a deeper, grittier sound and the rhythm of that sound can be controlled by covering and uncovering the sensor. There’s also a tower with peg attachments and dropping marbles down the tower produces a pattern of clinking sounds as the marbles bounce off of the tower attachments. Half of the peg attachments have holes in them to provide sounds of a different pitch and all the peg attachments can be rearranged to produce a desired pattern of sounds. Our initial concept also included the metronome hitting a row of marbles to produce a clearer and more distinct sound but we decided to only have the metronome moving at the beginning of the program as the metronome arm was too strong and kept knocking the marbles off the board.