Make: Online : Midi-Controlled Electricity

Midi-Controlled Electricity

Midilightning

I finally gave in and decided to post footage of me testing my OMG super secret musical DRSSTC. I designed it last year as a paid commission for a Danish arts group who wanted a chorus of six musical coils that could be played by MIDI. I made a single prototype to test it here, but they ran six coils together in the final system, built by Finn Hammer over in Denmark.

http://scopeboy.com/tesla/finns/musical_test_raw.mpg
http://scopeboy.com/tesla/finns/dazed-and-confrazzled.mpg

What I made was an adaptor board that connected the internal tone generators on a Roland JX-8P synth to one or more DRSSTCs. The board converted the volume envelope to burst length, so the harder you pounded the keys, the bigger the sparks got. Hitting a high pitched note hard would blow the fuses, and the MIDI arrangements had to take this into account.

[Via] [Scopeboy] [Finn Hammer]

Comments

Oldest comments listed first.

Posted by: noisyscott on June 29, 2006 at 10:49 AM

Sadly the links give a 404 error. Anyone have these vids? I'd really like to see (hear) this in action.

Reply to this comment

Posted by: Bre on June 29, 2006 at 11:14 AM

Thanks for the heads up. Links fixed!

Reply to this comment

Posted by: Vermin on June 29, 2006 at 7:11 PM

YES!

Reply to this comment

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