Mu 2801 – Making Music With Machines – A Term 2023

By: Abraham Dionne and Jack Kamataris

Image of the whole system

Image of the fingering mechanism

Image of the bowing mechanism

The design of the self-playing Violin is to be a low-cost violin robot that can be accessible to many, while also being small and portable just over the dimension of a full-size violin. Our robot is distributed and simple. It has 2 main mechanisms, bowing and fretting, that are each repeated 4 times to cover all the strings of the violin.

In our research of previous violin playing robots we found 2 examples in the category as most string style robots were in the form of guitars which are more heavily based on plucking strings rather than bowing them. The two examples we did find were the Hupfeld Phonoliszt Violina, and the Toyota personal assistant robot. We also looked at the “Resonant Chamber” by Animusic for inspiration on how to design our machine. Each of the existing violin robot designs we looked at were non-portable and extraordinarily expensive. As such, we are designing our robot to fill this gap in the market and allow access to low cost and portable robotic violin playing.

How It Works

This machine is a straightforward string instrument with no electrical additions. We intend to mimic a bowing mechanism by using small motors with TPU wheels which will be the primary form of sound production. These motors will be speed controlled and attached to servos that will allow us to adjust the pressure on each string and the speed of the wheels on each string to expand our dynamic range. There are also four independent arms that slide on the string and apply pressure to mimic human fingering. These four arms are controlled by servo motors and are fed angles to move to which are tuned and calculated.

Demonstration

Wiring and Microcontroller