Early Model of our Theremin
TOP TIP:
When working with sound coming out of the Nano. Instead of using the speaker that comes with the kit, output it to a 3.5inch audio port and grab a externally powered speaker or headphones from the ER to test sound. Although the small speaker works, if you’re actually trying to listen to the output the powered speakers work a lot better.
For our midterm project we decided to make a musical instrument. We wanted to create a device which created spooky or eerie sounds. For the inputs we decided to use time of flight sensors to measure distant of the the player’s hands. Some trouble we ran into was the that we had 2 identical time of flight sensors which meant that they had the same I2C address. This meant that we couldn’t communicate with both I2C components separately through the Nano. In order to work around this problem we used a multiplexer. This component is designed to take multiple I2C inputs and allow the Nano to communicate with them individually.
Then the output was obviously going to be sound. Using the Mozzie sound library we created sounds which we thought were eerie in a way. But the sounds produced was still intriguing and has a sense of musicality to it. We then used Mozzie to apply effects and manipulate the sound in different ways. One axis controlled the notes while the other axis controlled another variable with them being a low-pass filter or gain. We cycled through the effects using a button on the instrument. We wanted to implement delay as well but found that the Mozzie library could only add up to 7 milliseconds of delay which is extremely hard to hear.
Overall we felt that the project allowed us to experiment with sound which is an area that I wasn’t that familiar with prior to the project. Given more time we definitely would like to make the device look cleaner rather than just a bread board. But the input and outputs of our instrument was definitely intriguing to experiment with.