MU 2801 – Making Music with Machines – A Term 2022
By: Anuragi Thapliya, Christopher Libby, Rhea Clark
Tetris-iolin is a musical machine that plays the tune of the Tetris game theme song. It excites a violin E-string through a servo and there are four solenoids that are used for the dampening mechanism. The string is mounted on a thin piece of laser cut plywood that acts as the bridge. There is industrial grade Velcro alongside the string so the mounting positions of the solenoids can change based on what pitch needs to be produced. Therefore, this machine is fixed to this violin string but is not fixed to a specific song or piece. Using MIDI, any piece can be transposed to an E-string and the positions of the solenoids can easily be altered.
The first design of the Tetris-iolin included a sliding mechanism and six solenoids. However, once we decided on the Tetris theme song, we realized that by using an E-string and simplifying the song, we could reduce the number to four solenoids. We also decided not to add a slider as the theme song does not require ant glissandos or octave shifts. In the future, if a harder piece was chosen, the idea of a slider could be reintroduced.
Code
The code was written and uploaded through Arduino’s web editor. All of the solenoid and servo pins were made into global variables at the start of the code so if a pin number were to change, it would be a simple fix. Then, a number was assigned to each pin for when the mechanism would activate. The numbers correspond to the frequency of the note composed via Ableton Live. So, each solenoid corresponded to a different note and therefore knew when to activate.