Well, one of my hobbies is electronics, and I have collected quite a large amount of stuff from taking apart various electronic gizmos. In particular, I have a big box of electric motors and a whole bunch of wire. Sounds like a good place to start:
How does one make sound with a motor? You can make the motor spin at a certain speed, and if it's loud enough you'll hear a tone that's related to the motor speed. There's plenty of examples on the internet of people doing this. It's neat, but it's not exactly visually appealing, it's kind of complicated, and it doesn't really sound that good.
My next idea was to attach something to the motor spindle and have that thing agitate a tuned object. I thought about strings, like piano strings or violin strings, but we don't have any of those around that I'd be willing to spare. Glancing around the kitchen shows what we do have: empty beer bottles and dirty dishes. So it wasn't a strain to think of hitting beer bottles with water inside, and that's what I am going with.
The green stuff in there is just water with some food coloring so you can see the water level. I was able to get eleven notes from the Corona bottles, which is pretty good, just shy of one octave. I think the shape of the bottle limits the pitches; the jump in water levels from the lowest note to the next higher one is very big, and it ends up on the other side of the bell shape of the bottle. The other notes change more gradually. For a full-fledged instrument I'll probably need a variety of shapes to get a good range.
The motors are pretty small and they don't have much torque, so whatever is attached to them can't be very big. I've been playing with a little piece of bicycle innertube taped to the motor. It's easy to get and easy to fabricate. There are some problems, but it's working ok for now.
To add a little bit of randomness to the sound, my idea is to dangle a motor directly above each bottle. The motor will bounce around the bottle, creating a quick varied rhythm. I haven't made a jig to hold the motors yet; that's the next step. The length of the wire suspending the motor will make a big difference; with a long wire the motor can bounce pretty far off the bottle, and even into the neighboring ones. That's ok for an ambient sound machine or something like a wind chime, but the idea is that this is an instrument; bouncing around into neighboring notes is a bit too random.
You can see from the video that the rubber on the end of the motor fouls up on itself at the end there. Improvements are forthcoming :) The motors could be controlled easily enough with push buttons, but I'm still thinking about the human interface to this instrument. Something that moves the wire closer to the instrument would give the player more control, but it might be tricky to have any sort of accuracy. I'll leave that for later :)
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