MU 2801 Making Music With Machines, A-2022
Darren Ni, Aidan Higuera, Benjamin Skarnes, Carlton Mugo
The Hurdy-Gurdy Player is designed to be a attachment to the assembled UGears Hurdy-Gurdy model, which is built entirely out of laser-cut wood. The instrument consists of a hand crank that turns a rosined wheel, which excites the strings. There are two strings on this particular hurdy-gurdy – a drone string and a string that can change pitch with 6 side buttons. There is a lever on the drone string to activate and deactivate it, and wheels at the bridge to set the height of the strings. Finally, there are two tuners at the head of the instrument to change the string tension.
The assembled nature of the hurdy-gurdy allowed us some flexibility in our design by allowing us to remove the hand-crank. This allowed us to lay the hurdy-gurdy flat on a surface, which made it easier to work on. We were also able to latch our machine using the nooks and crannies that came with the design.
Inspirations
When brainstorming ideas for our project, we considered many ideas, such as a solenoid string player or a servo percussion machine, but we wanted to try to find something unique that hasn’t been done before. After Aidan told us about his hurdy-gurdy, we decided that it would be really interesting to build a player for that, as we have not seen any examples of it before. Out of curiosity, we looked online for any prior implementations, and the closest thing we could find was a robot hurdy-gurdy that was as big as a person and made out of mostly metal. Based on what was available online, we decided that an automatic system for the UGears Hurdy-Gurdy would be a unique, interesting, and achievable implementation.
Design
When considering our design, we knew from the beginning that we wanted to create something that would work without damaging the instrument, thus, ideas such as gluing pieces to the body of the instrument were discarded from the start. After some deliberation, we decided that a hook-on attachment to the side of the instrument would be an appropriate starting point. We measured the dimensions of where our attachment would go, and then laser cut panels in order to fit them together into a box. We planned solenoids to go inside of the box, each hitting a button, therefore we would have 6 solenoids in total. At this point, we thought that we could also use some sort of motor to turn the hurdy-gurdy wheel. We decided to use a rubber wheel connected to a motor to turn the hurdy-gurdy wheel.
Roadblocks
Of course, with any project, there’s a guarantee that something will get in the way. In our case, the package for the 24V solenoids and the 24V power supply both got delayed until after the final presentation, which obviously left us very little to work with. Another problem was that the board that controls the wheel had an internal malfunction, causing the wheel to constantly reverse direction at seemingly random intervals. Thus, we had to represent our solenoids with LED’s and our wheel with a 5V motor. These worked as expected.
| Assembly | Part | Manufacturer | Quantity | Price |
| Instrument | Hurdy-Gurdy | UGears | 1 | $89.99 |
| Actuator | 24V Solenoid | Heyiarbeit | 6 | $81.54 |
| Control | Microcontroller | Arduino | 1 | $29.95 |
| Exciter | Wheel | Unknown | 1 | N/A |
Total Cost: $201.48
Code
The program uses python to send signals to the Arduino, using the data and timings in the music.txt file. The Arduino then reads the signals coming in and immediately changes the pins in order to fire the solenoids/leds, and change the motor speed. The text file is shown below.
Future Development
As it stands, there is quite a bit of room for additional development of this project. First and foremost, the solenoids have to be implemented in place of their LED representations. Second, a new method to control the wheel should be implemented in order to fully complete the machine. Looking beyond, we have ideas to create a variable tuning mechanism that could be attached to the head of the instrument, working together with the other parts to create a fully functional self-playing hurdy-gurdy. Although our project is not exactly groundbreaking, from what we’ve seen online – or rather, what we haven’t seen – this theoretical completed product would be undoubtedly unique within the world of musical machines.