I just happened to be cutting shapes in acrylic and discovered my unit could sing.
I’m in the process of making drop spindles with cool designs and mixed media; wood/acrylic, wood/metal [I’ll cut metal with a different process, ie a good jewelers saw], etc. I am going to cut the exact same shapes from various material and have them play nice together. Acrylic just happened to be the first.
It was when the motors moved the head to this design,
that the motors generated rythmic and melodic series of notes. The notes seemed to be a repeating series, but quickly changed in small ways. Changes included the rhythm of the notes; the sequence the notes were played; and eventually the tempo
I can’t wait to do this in wood. I’m pretty sure it will sing again since it’s all in the noise of the hardware. Has anyone else has experienced this?
I did some experimenting to find the frequencies for different angle of cut with intent to get it to play a simple tune (Imperial death march), but nothing about the movement was linear (I used Audacity and FFT.) It became so tedious, I abandoned it.
I don’t have fancy music equipment, or the desire to collect more $ equipment (it’s a rabbit hole I fall into easily). But I would like to record mine as a meditative few minutes of peace when I’m getting stressed out. Maybe record on my iPad and upload to my iMac?
One year at Burning Man they had an even bigger coil hooked up to a synthesizer so that people people could come and play music on the coil. I’m sure it has been there more than once but I’ve only seen it that one time.
Ah, here it is. Not a great video but you get the idea.
It looks like they upgraded it the following year.
