[sdiy] Chaotic/lo-fi patching techniques

[Sean Ellis]

Once I got a very small bowl of water and experimented with dipping patch 
cables into it to see the resistance. The goal was to make some sort of 
illuminated rotating lfo with water splashing around :) It worked OK but 
needed a tiny amount of water or the resistance was too great.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Keller" <psilord at cs.wisc.edu>
To: "|||||||||| ||||||||||" <beschaving at gmail.com>
Cc: <synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl>
Sent: Monday, April 07, 2008 9:23 PM
Subject: Re: [sdiy] Chaotic/lo-fi patching techniques


> 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):
>
> | _____________________________________________ |
> | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| |
> |~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|
> -------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
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