Mechatronic Art and Music

These are the four final projects from the 2020 "Mechatronic Art & Music" course. Each student was tasked with opened ended assignment of designing and creating their own electro-mechanical device related to their personal creative practice. Carl Burgin, Trevor Bock, Charles Danner, Cy Krafft & Kai-Luen Liang

Kai-Luen Liang

Tomorrow There Will Be Wind ( Automatic Windchimes )
A performance of playing an Arduino controlled set of wind chimes.
Vibration motors are activated through a motor driver creating divisions and
polyrhythms based on various “states.” First iteration prototype with beer
bottle activation.


 

Trevor Bock

4-Note Bottle Blowing Instrument

I have always loved the angelic sound that is produced by blowing into an empty glass
bottle. The combination of wind noise and the ringing sine wave tone that resonates out of the
bottle creates a fascinating timbre that is impossible to perfectly replicate digitally. What if you
could mechanically create this sound and produce beautiful melodies to perform with it? This is
what inspired me to create the 4-Note Bottle Blowing Instrument. This device contains four
small fans attached to DC motors mounted in a specific way to effectively blow air into each of
the bottles. This causes them to resonate and create a fairly loud sine tone. Each bottle is
individually tuned by raising and lowering the amount of water inside them. Using an Arduino,
the instrument will then perform a sequence of notes by fading the fans in and out from left to
right. This allows musicians to tune each bottle accordingly and create any four part melody
they desire.


 

Cy Krafft

Liquid Light Movers

This work in progress was inspired by a love of old school liquid light shows and a fascination
with the precise engineering of the inside of a moving head. The goal is to repurpose the
internal mechanisms from used Clay Paky Alpha Spot and Alpha Wash fixtures to create an
animating liquid light show in the beam of the fixtures.
I began with the Alpha Wash fixtures due to the less complex internal layout. However, due to
the limited range of beam effects in the fixture, the color wheels were my first choice for
modification. The challenge with the color wheels was adapting the rotational movement of the
color wheels into the vertical movement of a plate.
The first iteration of this design is made of two clear discs connected by a silicone tube to create
a sealed container that is then filled with the dyed oil and water. The two discs can then be
oscillated against each other through the use of a ridged gear on the inside of the metal plates
holding the discs. This creates the fluid movement associated with traditional liquid light shows.
In addition, the entire mechanism can be moved in and out of the beam to add or remove the
effect. The prototype of this iteration is still in development


 

Charles Danner

TOY P1ANO

The TOY P1ANO is a self-playing hyper
instrument 30 Key Schoenhut Piano modified with
solenoids, copper contacts + contact mics
Mux chips + Teensy Audio shield + teensy3.6
to read keys + output Midi
Excitation from contact mics synthesizes a
tuned modeled string based on the
Karplus-Strong synthesis model


 

Jennie Park

Three kinetic sculptures explore relationships between circularity/co-opting/recycling and linearity/polarization/binary-ness, and how personal agency or positionality intersects with these linked mechanics. (They’re NOT “voting machines;” they reflect the operation of many large systems, frameworks and conversations, e.g., the relationship between the DIY ethos and capitalism, between the political far left and far right, and among nested […]

Socks Whitmore

Quarantine Acoustics When Jacob’s estranged sister Ashley asks him to reprise a role from his past, the two must come to terms with their relationship to his younger ‘female’ self in order to save their own. “Pass” is a queer one act musical in development. It had a staged reading on January 26, 2020 in […]

Hamed Dehqan

Burn This is an abstract and artificial image of burning flowers under sunlight as a lover of love feels burning.     

Robert Steven Nover

The Fabric Of Our Country This is the start of a new project combining my photography with digital painting. “The Fabric Of Our Country_#1, #2 & #3″, March 2020, 13″ x 19” dye print on Hahnemuhle Fine Art Baryta Satin paper.  

Joana P. Cardozo

The Naked Hours For 100 hours, I cut 2 x 2 inches black paper with scissors and covered the L-Shape Gallery walls at the California Institute of the Arts. I did not speak. I did not use a cell phone or other electronics. I ate, rested, wrote, and meditated as necessary. I left the gallery […]

Sonia Vargas

Lights Lights of a carousel illuminating the dark sky https://syvargas470.wixsite.com/website