Just finished an Arduino sketch for a bottle synth.  You might ask- why am I making a bottle synth?

This weekend there is a synth-in at the p.irateship.  Most simply- its a weekend hack session starting on Saturday at noon with demos on Sunday at 3, to work on compositions, hardware, software, whatever music-y and synth-y.  So its kind of like music hack day without all the commercialness and with actual hacking.

You should swing by the demos at 3pm tomorrow, here.  E-mail/tweet/txt/call me if the door is not open. 

The first one was a few months ago, and it came out with projects like an Android app that continuously samples (so you can for example hear what you said 1 minute ago and save it), and a spectrometer filter and visualizer (this one felt like you were playing sunshine).  The projects were pretty inspiring.

What I’m working on

The last week I’ve seen a couple sweet kinetic synthesizer projects- so combining simple robotics and sound making, and using physical objects and automation to generate sound:

Ethan rose using a bell and a speaker playing the bell sound in reverse:

Click to see a video of the concept

And another by Zimoun called sculpting sound- tons of motors connected to ping pong balls on boxes. You get this waterfall like sound.

So I’m connecting motors to bottles, and each motor axis has some object connected to it.  With the motor turns on, this object rattles around the bottle.  So each bottle can be played electronically, with a percussive tapping, whose timbre and speed varies.

Here is what they looked like earlier, around 6ish.

I’ll be including some more interface components for performing with them.