[sdiy] Chaotic/lo-fi patching techniques

[Peter Keller]

On Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 08:24:59PM +0200, |||||||||| |||||||||| wrote:
> I'd love to hear about other ways that people are "mechanically"
> interfacing with their synths. I vaguely remember seeing some design
> that just had a number of metal nails sticking up, for example, that
> one would either touch or clamp crocodile cables to.
> I also seem to remember something with a metal ball rolling around
> another bed of nails?

Having just made up this method and never tried it, how about this:

Make a 2D nail board with the tips precisely vertically aligned and
suspend it over salt water where the tips are *almost* touching the water.
The nail tip have to be high enough though that surface tension doesn't
leave a connection from the nails to the water.

It would look like this (~ is water):

| _____________________________________________ |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| |
|~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|
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Then, produce waves in the water box. The crests of the waves and of the
constructive interference will produce interesting patterns of electrical
connection.

You could drive longer non electrically connected nails through the nail board
and into the water that when you hit with a mallet, produce the waves at
different 2D points in the water box. That would look like this:

|                                               |
| |___|___|___|___|___|___|___|___|___|___|___| |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| |
|~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|
-------------------------------------------------

Then, hitting the nails could produce more interesting repeatable wave
interference patters much better than hitting the box would.

The above is a linear version of the system, a full system would be
fully 2D.

Later,
-pete