Our group had fun coming up with different ideas for the project last week. This week we're trying to narrow down from trying things out. For example, we tried to use distant sensor and accelerometer, but the gestures to play the instrument are random and it would be hard to sync with the light patterns that Bowei wanted to create. At the end, we made a musical stick with the built-in accelerometer, and to create tones for each gestures.
First, I made a simple musical instrument by myself just to see what tones we could create with different sensors (see video 1). With distant sensor and pressure resistor, I was able to create a melody. I noticed the tones are weird, and are not what they should sound like due to the poor quality of the speaker.
Video 1
For our project, the musical stick will make a short tone when it tilts down. It sounds simple, but we couldn't get it to make certain sounds based on a gesture at the beginning. The tones are mixed sometimes, and they don't have crisp sounds. David was in charge of the code since I wasn't familiar with the boolean and array syntaxes. We still couldn't get the sound we wanted through his code because of the speaker. However, the idea of our musical stick is cool, and it's different from the simple musical instrument I made. I learned a lot of new things and learned how to collaborate over Zoom on an interactive project, which I'm happy about.
What I learned:
- It's important to have a concept/story behind a project, and don't start the project with thinking of making something cool. I just wanted to make something simple but meaningful. Since my teammates have experience with making things with Arduino and they are familiar with programing, we started the project with a lot of big and vague ideas, which I didn't agree. But, I didn't raise my voice because I wanted to learn from them, and thought that it'd be cool to make something very cool. However, I felt bad that I couldn't help much with the code.
TBC with finished recorded video...
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