MU2801 – Making Music with Machines (A20)

Joseph Dobbelaar, Cole Rabe, John Martel, and Alvaro Gonzalez

Dustin is a very rough take on a singing/sound-producing mouth. It consists of a stepper motor mounted inside of a plastic water bottle with its bottom removed.  The stepper motor will be receiving MIDI signals and it will vibrate at the pitch you wanted to from Ableton live.

The whole apparatus is suspended from a PVC frame. The bottle acts as a resonating chamber and the cut bottom can be opened and closed to change the volume of the sound coming out. The opening and closing if the mouth is controlled by a servo, pulling on the metal bar and releasing it. Two servo motors control lateral compression of the mouth with a pop sickle stick attached to each one.