Musical Instruments
I enjoy messing around with sensors and everyday objects and turning them into musical instruments. I use a combination of arduino and Faust (and amazingly powerful digital synthesiser coding language). Here are two of them.
Digital Singer:
The sewing foot (controlled by a footpedal) triggers a photo interrupter. Each edge triggers a note to be produced by the arpeggiator.
The arm of the singer is fitted with capacitive sensors that act as a treble touch keyboard.
Smooth Crimini:
Four types of mushrooms are fitted with piezo microphones. The measured excitation is fed into a modal model (tuned to sound like a celesta, with 3 metallic overtone harmonics), and as such the mushrooms become drums. Cucumber slices are used as a capacitive keyboard to control the fundamental frequency of the modal model.