New prototype

Over the past couple of weeks we've been working on developing our idea. We've decided that making some kind of roller to pull the drawings over a row of LDRs is not the best sollution. Instead of pulling the drawings over the LDRs we are going to spread out as many LDRs as we can to create a much larger drawing surface so that as you draw you can hear the sounds being produced rather than just having to guess what your picture will sound like. We've produced another prototype along these lines, here's a wee snap of that...

With this prototype we've just been taping some acetate over the top of it and drawing onto it. We've also decided that we like the idea of being able to 'save' your song, as in keep the piece of acetate and put it back on the LDRs to prodcuce the same song again and again.

We'll keep you posted on our progress :)

Donald and Richard

Progress

This week we developed our interaction, of somehow drawing to create sound, further. We also decided that we will use 8-bit sounds (the kind of music you hear in old video games) as there is something simple yet quite pleasing about them.

This is our 3rd prototype, basically it has 5 round grooves along the top surface which are big enough to fit 5 of our LDRs (the wires come through the small hole in the middle of each groove). The idea is that a sheet of acetate is placed over the top of the surface and the user can draw whatever they feel like. This drawing will then somehow (we've not quite decided how yet) be pulled over the line of LDRs, playing the drawing in sequence.
We were pointed towards barrel organs as inspiration, they are similar in the way that the music is pre-decided and just pulled past the music playing bit.

Donald and Richard :)

Idea development

So last week we decided on and started developing what we think will be our final idea. Basically we're going to create some kind of sound interaction which involves drawing. We also made some basic prototypes using LDRs, cardboard and some mdf.

The cardboard box (on the right hand side of the picture) was our first prototype, it was basically a cover for our breadboard and other components which had a small acetate window which had 3 LDRs under it. As you coloured over the window with a black marker the LDRs would be covered and a sound would play. The problem was that when only on of the LDRs was covered there was still too much light getting through and therefore the sound was not playing.

This is our second prototype, its similar to the first except that each LDR has its own space so that light only gets to it from directly above. Therefore when you colour in each square with the black marker the sound starts to play. You can then cover more than one (and more sounds will play) or you an rub out the squares that you have already covered.

We were also interested in developing some kind of system to enable the user to 'draw a song' then remove the acetate sheet to 'save' the song. This would mean that if you wanted to play a song you had previously created you would just put that piece of acetate back on top of the LDRs.

Here's a short video of our second prototype in action, enjoy!