Need HELP converting wind into music

OLIVER KASS

Can anyone give me some tips on how to go about creating a device which uses natural wind power to create music from a synthesiser? I am a musician not an electronics specialist so feel free to dum down any help you can give me! For example can I make a cheap scale model for next to nothing? What stuff will I need to buy? And would it be possible to stimulate light/colour using a similar method?

PLEASE HELP ME

Oliver Kass

Lee Harker

Oliver,
It is not clear what you intend to do. Are you asking if wind power could be used to provide power for a synthisizer or if you could use the variances in the wind to adjust the music. The answer to both is yes but you would use different approaches for each.
To power a synthesizer from the wind you would need a windmill of some sort and voltage conditioning circuitry.
To create variances in musical notes and volume, I would assume you would use the wind speed and direction as the input. You can measure wind speed with anything that spins in the wind and a opto-interupter. This would be as accurate or inaccurate as the spinning object. For wind direction, you could attach a windvane to a continuously turning pot, a shaft encoder, or a series of reed switches. This could all be done on a limited budget depending on the contents of your junk box.
As a newbie in this area, you may want to look through the archives for discussions about weather stations etc. Also for the output to the synth., you will want to read up on Midi interfacing.

Lee

OLIVER KASS

Lee,

The premise for my idea is to use a contraption similar to a wind chime or·childs mobile to trigger music on a synth via midi. I would also like to know if the same contraption could trigger a lighting rig in the same fashion. I am aware by looking at other forum topics that the stamp controller is a very versitile tool, but as I am a complete beginner·I really don't know where to start!

Oli

prprog

Oliver

Follow this link: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/papers/cs/26756/http:zSzzSzwww.csl.sony.co.jpzSzpersonzSzpoupzSzresearchzSzchi2000wshpzSzpaperszSzverplank.pdf/verplank00course.pdf

This is one of the various papers from the NIME 2001 workshop. There is an idea for a wind chime-BS2-Synth(MIDI) controller.

PRPROG

Paul Baker

Ok Oliver, how's this approach:

Create a wind chime out of any tubular material (Im thinking some sort of plastic like thin walled pvc so the chime doesn't make a sound of its own) cut them to equal lengths and string them up around a ring with the standard type of vane and clapper. Place IR leds inside each of the tubes, create an additional ring and suspend it so there is about an inch clearance between it and the tubes above it, mount IR detectors directly beneath the tube. This way whenever the chime is disturbed, the IR beam is interrupted which your stamp would register as a chime strike and you would send the appropriate MIDI command to the synth. If you wanted to get fancy, you could mount 7 IR receivers below each tube, to understand how Im thinking of mounting them, take 7 pennies, place one down on the table then place the remaining 6 around the first so that adjacent coins are touching and a hexagonal shape is made. This would give you additional information about the direction of the chime's swing and some information about the amplitude of the chime's swing. These two additional parameters could be used as MIDI control signals·such as·velocity.

Below is a pictoral view of a single chime setup:

________    Ring
   |
   |        Wire
   |
  ---
  | |
  | |       Tube
  | |
  | |
  |^|       IR LED
___ ____    Ring
   V        IR receiver

OLIVER KASS

Paul,

Thanks for your help so far, the only thing that i am still struggling with is how the same kind of contraption might be able to generate colour onto a screen. If I can find a way of doing this my wish is to have an installation that could be used in places like wating rooms or offices as a kind of ever changing piece of art, made up of wind generated colour and sound.

Oli

Paul Baker

Which part of the color issue are you having difficulty with, the aquisition of data to generate color information or the displaying the color information?

jdolecki

To start off i would just use the wind chime as part of the circurt. im assuming that it is made of some sort of conductive metal so all you would have to do is connect the tube to ground and suspend a length of stiff wire inside the tube this way any movement of the tube will cause a connection between the wire and the tube.. As for velocity sensing like a keyboard i will have to thing about that some more.

Paul Baker

If your question is in regards to the aquisition of data suitable to generate color, how about using the 7 pennies configuration to represent a color wheel, the three additive primaries occupy three positions with 120° seperation and thier additive combinations occupy the remaining trinity. More complex color arrangements could be obtained by combining the output of multiple chimes, for instance you could combine three chime sensor to produce a number in hue/saturation/value space (HSV) to generate a possible 6³ (216) colors. Even more subtle variations can be achieved if you properly account for more than one color value being activated simultaneously (if the chime was midway between yellow and green, the output would be yellow-green).

You may find the change of color to be too drastic and disorienting, you could instead do an offseting system. Define each channel as an incremental adjustment of a single color, look at the figure to see what I mean, so each time the chime hits a sensor you perform the incremental color shift operation.

You of course could do this in any color space you prefer, RGB is the easiest to work with when your outputing colored lights since no translation of color space is required, but gradations in HSV and other color models create a more asthetic transition, You could experiment which color model produces the most astheic appearence in the color shifting.