Tesla Coil Music - News
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Musical Tesla coils - Boing Boing
It turns out, you can make music out of anything that makes noise, just by turning it on and off very rapidly.
If you record a noise of you tapping your fingers on your laptop keyboard, and then speed it up so you hear 440 taps per second, you'll hear A4, the A above middle C on the standard keyboard. Likewise with the tesla coils, we make a giant spark and then turn it on and off at the right audio frequency for the note we want to play.
This is accomplished by a series of circuits and microchips we designed, which convert a standard MIDI signal (coming from a MIDI keyboard or from the MIDI output on our laptop) to the fiber-optic signal that the tesla coil requires. Why fiber optic? Because we don't want a copper wire connecting our keyboardist to the thing that makes a million volts ;-)
sure is dope, but I'm confused.
It says that it is playing the Girl Talk mix, and I hear it in the background, but then they say that a keyboardist can be playing via fiber optic cable. So is this the GT recording accompanied by a Tesla coil keyboard player? Given that we see sparks corresponding to bass lines and melodies, but not percussion and voices, it makes me think that they can't reproduce the full spectrum of sound, necessitating an accompaniment.
But if they are isolating the the melody and bass from the actual recording (like a cross-over routes specific freqs to woofers vs tweeters) and the leftover freqs go to the PA, why so quiet? Is the video mic'd poorly, or do they need a bigger amp/PA combo to be heard over the coils?
I'm not mad if they need accompaniment, but they need to balance that sound before this is performance-ready. Why is nobody in the audience? If you're playing club music, it's pretty eerie to have nobody around. It would be dope to have them ceiling-mounted, so they didn't take up the whole dance floor.
Also, I wonder how does one safely ground those posts? Directly into the ground, or is there boss insulated cable between or what? it looks like serious business.
I took my family to see Arc Attack at the NYC maker faire last year. My step-mom had never seen a tesla coil before, and certainly not a totally bad-ass huge pair of them. I saw a tear in her eye when they started! But then her face kind of sank when she realised they were playing the Imperial March from Star Wars. I had to agree that the music thing was a big downer. It's tacky!
Back in the 60's my dad brought me to a Christmas party at work in Lackland AFB, San Antonio, TX. He was a researcher for the Air Force, and used an IBM mainframe to run data. At the party, someone ran a program to make the line printer play Christmas songs. It was a dot matrix printer that printed a whole line of text at once, and you could get different notes using different combinations of letters and spaces hitting the paper.