Sometimes I liked to close my eyes and try to see how far I can go, but it really scared me everytime. I think I need to build confident to walk far. So in todays project, I closed my eyes, to learn experience of a blind person. I wrote a dairy in my laptop with ‘voice over’ turned on, listen to iTune music, played LEGO for about 4 hours(really need patience), successful went to bathroom(of course sit to pee, easier!). It’s a fun experience, hope anyone can give it a try. Here is the Dairy I typed with my eyes closed.
4-in-4 Day 4
In today’s project, I decide to close my eyes for 6 hours. I want to let my eyes have winter special break also. And this will be my first time I intend to close my eyes for this long. Since I prepared everything on my table, I don’t feel scared as I expected, maybe I haven’t start to learn how to walk(or meet any failure). I can do very limit thing on my computer, like listen to music from itune or pandora.com, but I don’t know the how to choose one. The voice over function is very helpful, I’m using it to guide me type now. I learned I need to type very carefully, make as less problem as possible, because once I made mistake, I need to listen what I delete,find the right position, and start to type agin. The way you listen to delete words i like to read a word backward. This is also one weird thing Ilearned of typing today. And I just realised the voice over is very smart. When I typed ‘learnd’ instead of ‘learned, the system know it is not right, so when delete from the back, the voice over will read out misspelling d’. Isn’t SMART! Also, if you turn on the’capital’ key, when you type the system will rea out the letter in an excited voice. The next thing I did is playing LEGO. I had a LEGO box of different parts. I have to classify all the parts first by touch. Then, I can figure out what kind of shapes I can build. I decide start with building a car. To make it more fun, I build 3 layers on it. It needs lots ofPATIENCE. I remembered I rebuilded 4 times for the base. Every time I only need to adjust a little bit. I spend about 4 hours on it. Sometimes I dropped parts on the floor, I can know the basic area to find because of the dropping sound; sometimes I can recognize people by nose. I know petra came around by recognizing her perfume. The things different from normal people is I need to use my brain to memorize everything, which is so different from memorizing pictures. Our eyes are so powerful, we rely on it too much. When I start to walk to the bath room, about 20 meters away. I can’t walk straight. I’m alittle scared. I think I knew I won’t get hurt and all my friends are not far away, I can call for help at any time.And I made it.But I waled really careful. Seems like everything slowed down. and feels more lonely and not confidentableTo feel the world as a blind person, II think people who can’t see, needs more tolerence from society.
I saw a video from youtube long time before, a guy made a machine to shoot a peanut into the air. When I discussed with Ben, I remembered this video, also I was impressed by Vikram’s laser shot machine, so I came up the idea to combine these two things together. We start to build with LEGO, but it turns out, lego is too light, not enough energy. So we went to ITP second ER ‘Trash Shelf’, we found everything we thought we could use. And finally, we made this little funny machine. Thanks Ben and all the testers.
This toy is not well desigend yet, after I cut, sand, drill in 5 hours, I realize I forget(/don’t know I need to) to put the ‘Languid’, which to make the air over the hole. Also I can’t find a store to buy small springs, which are used to push the key up. At last, I made a dream(/fake) video to illustrate my little instrument. Here it is:
I fell in love with Origami last week, I decided to use Origami Magic Ball shape to make a lamp. The idea is to make the lamp adjustable in order to create different shapes. Here is a little piece of video process…
After several weeks work, finally I made a workable demo for my guitar robot. However, the sound is not as good as I thought. I will refine my design a lot.
things needs to be done in the future:
1. replace solenoid to servo motor
2. rebuild wood box with more curve
3. redesign the movement of the pick
4. redesign the motor mount
5. stable the supporting bar
here is some pictures and video’s of it.
Do not prejudge this, it’s harder than you think to make it fast.
I’m glad to be a team with Steven Litt, we experimented more than 10 different ways to make our mouse trap car faster and straighter. And we learned a lot from building it. Again, LEGO is so great to make fast production. Here is some photo of our little racer.
After reading the book, I realized how smart LEGO is designed! After a short while playing with it, I find it’s the BEST tool for rapid prototyping. It can simulate lots of machines we are using everyday. David and I built some machines following the instruction book. We feel not enough. We tried to built several machines, including Theo Jansen’s walking machine(someone built in LEGO, Amazing). However, we think we might used all the box to built it, after finished the first leg, we give it up. Then I realized the chain machine from Arthur Ganson will be easy to build, so David and I start to build it before Class, after 2 hours building(however, we found it harder to make the motor at the bottom, so we made it upside down), here comes it:
Music Machine is a microchip controlled mechanical musical instrument. The interaction between user and this machine is the color information on a piece of paper. By analyzing colors, the machine will map this information and send signals to related motors, which will strike musical strings in order to generate sounds. User will get fully entertainments from both string-produced sound and motor-triggered mechanical movement.
RELATED BACKGROUND
I’m very interested into the relationship between color and music. As a software engineering background student in ITP, I used to use 3D technology to visualize this relationship. ‘Colorful Melody’ is one installation I made to generate digital sound by mapping live image from web camera on a screen. Also in nature, color as one waveform, shares a lot of comment attributes as sound. By mathematically mapping this information, it became an interesting process to generate certain patterns to manipulate those data. From certain point of view, Music Machine is a modern version of player piano. Instead of reading holes on a paper, musical machine will read color information as analog input. Also, drawing on a paper has more arbitrary possibilities than punching hole by following some patterns. With the help of magnet pickup and signal amplification circuit, it’s also possible to control volume change on the output.
‘Absolut Quartet’ is another inspiration for me to choose to use mechanical sound instead of computer-synthesized sound. ‘Absolut Quartet’ is music making machine, which is played by three instruments. The main instrument is a ballistic marimba, which launches rubber balls roughly 2m into the air, precisely aimed to bounce off of 42 chromatic wooden keys. Besides the acoustic sounds, the movement of balls in the air is visually enjoyable. The machine perfectly mixed the analog and digital realms in its own way.
In 2001, a company called ‘Animusic’ published their first computer-animated music album ‘Animusic 1′. They used computer 3D technology to generate the animation of graphical instrument elements and synthesize sound effects for the animation. Through a lot of design elements in the animation is surrealistic, however, I got tremendous inspiration from them, and I believe, with modern technology, some of the instruments in the animation could be made in a quite large possibility. Actually, ‘Absolut Quartet’ is very similar with one of the instruments in it.
In this project, I tried to experiment the relationship between color information and sound. I mapped the color into the sound, and visualized the color also. In computer, this mapping is easy to do, because both music and color have lots of attributes. If I want to make mechanical music, the sound will be largely limited. Also, if I use solenoid motor, it will change the analog sound into digital. Despite all this limitations, mechanical music have its special character: unique sound, real time movements, etc. I also want to experimental the light/shadow to visualize this instrument.
It is the first ‘big’ project I built by using mechanical movements. With little background and material references, I spent most of the time by looking for the right materials. Most the machine was built in wood. The gears are coming with the motor, I made other gears by cutting plastic or hacking from broken printers. Also used a lot of glue to mount a small magnet on to the rubber chain. Anyway, I’m surprised to see the machine move at the first beginning.
I think I’m really like building stuff, and enjoy the mechanical movements. To build a music robot is one way to realize both mechanics and music. To interactive with color is one direction I should follow in ITP.
