Planet Arduino

Prankophone  is the new interactive installation by Dmitry Morozov (his amazing projects have been featured on this blog ).  This time he created  a sound object, a hybrid of synthesizer, telephone and logic module:

The main principle of the object’s functioning is as follows: depending on the current mode, the apparatus calls to random or pre-defined recipients and plays them algorithmic melodies created from their phone numbers. The speakers transmit both the synthesized sounds and the sound from answering person. The common sound layer is involving a random recipient who doesn’t suspect anything. The person who answers the phone can’t hear any other sounds except for the synthesized ones.

You can play with it in 4 different modes:

– Autonomous mode –  it generates the numbers by itself and tries to reach them, and play them the sounds.
– Manual mode – when you dial any number by pressing standard phone keys it gets automatically transformed into sounds.
– Keyboard mode – mode of dialing the number on the one-octave keyboard where 10 keys correspond to 10 digits.
– Live mode – the number is defined by any of the previous methods, but the sounds are reproduced not automatically but from the keyboard, thus the user may “communicate” through sound with the person who answered.
It runs on Arduino Mega and you can listen to its sounds on the following video:

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:

Field Lines is an interactive instrument designed by composer Charles Peck as part of his Threshold of Beauty project. On his website, Charles says that the installation is his largest piece to date:

Constructing this substantial piece of equipment drew on a number of disciplines including physical design, carpentry (an occasional hobby of mine), circuit design, and coding. As alluded in the title, this piece focuses on the magnetic field. There are three sections of magnetic material, including magnetic sand, a compass array, and zinc-plated iron. Audiences are able to manipulate these materials with a magnet in the space below each case while infrared sensors pick up their movement. The sensors send that information to an Arduino board, which then creates unique music for each section.

The instrument itself contains 3 separate cases of magnetic material, including magnetic sand, a compass array, and zinc-plated iron. Audiences are able to manipulate these materials with a magnet in the space below each case while infrared distance sensors pick up their movement. The sensors send that information to an Arduino Mega 2560 board, which then uses the Mozzi audio library to create spontaneous music. Thus providing the audience a chance to be part student, as they learn about the magnetic field, and part composer, as they craft the music.

Watch the video below:

This installation was premiered at the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis, it currently resides at the Works Museum in Bloomington and was generously supported by the McKnight Foundation and the American Composer’s Forum.

Global Sounds is an interactive installation by Rebecca Gischel. It is composed by a series of pyramids made of acrylic glass installed in a square in Edinburgh and each of them programmed to play different instrumental sections of a song when interacted with.

The composition, which was written especially for the project and includes a mix of instruments symbolic of different cultures such as the kato and didgeridoo, allude to the multicultural richness migrants have brought to the UK and Europe bringing parts of their own culture with them.

The song is combined of 7 instruments and 7 pyramids. At first, none of the instruments plays. When someone is standing beside a pyramid, one instruments starts to play. The more people come together, the more instruments join in. Each pyramid has a light bulb inside which is like an equalizer of one instruments. When there are at least 7 people playing with the installation together, the square becomes a play of sound and light. When all pyramids are working together, they compose an harmonic musical piece in its entirety.

Rebecca wrote us:

I used the Arduino Uno. I have one webcam with a fisheye lens on the top of each pyramid. I used the flob library + processing to detect if someone is standing beside a pyramid. If so, one instrument starts to play and processing gives the digital values of the equalizer to Arduino (photo ‘Arduino picture 1′, this was my first testing of the equalizer with normal LEDs). I wanted to use real light bulb instead of LED’s, so I build a transformer (photo ‘Arduino picture 3′) which translates the Arduino-Input into an 12V-Output for the light bulbs which are powered by a car battery. I used 7 pins, one pin per light bulb.