Bring the Noise
| May 5th, 2010Back in March I got involved with Resonator at the AV Festival, and had a go at building something noisy. I’ll admit I felt a little bit out of my depth, but with some assistance (major thanks go to Martin Howse for all his help) I managed to build a simple square wave oscillator and amplifier based on a pair of LM386s with a potentiometer to control the frequency of the wave.
I took it home to do some tinkering, and ended up putting it to one side whilst I worked on other things. However, after going through the tutorials I thought I’d try and build something similar using Arduino. I took the pitch follower example (http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Tone2) and set it up as directed, effectively building a sort of irritating theremin.
However, I wanted to look into other control interfaces. My course mate Aaron managed to get hold of a Spectra Symbol SoftPot potentiometer (http://dkc1.digikey.com/us/en/ph/spectrasymbol/softpot.html) and we thought this would make a really cool interface for the pitch follower. We replaced the photoresistor with the SoftPot and had some pretty good results.
Check out the video here:
I’m interested in constructing intuitive interfaces for devices, particularly musical instruments, and thought this definitely could be of some use.
More to come soon.