By: Mohamed Ihsan
Partners: Isaiah Bayas, Alexsa
Written On: 11/23/2021
The purpose of this project is to create a MIDI Sound Board that works through use of light as a medium for generating sound. For this project, we utilized a set of light sensors, which upon sensing a change in Photons, would trigger LED lights and MIDI notes on a computer. We built the housing to have a set of light panels that shine down on the sensors, allowing for more controlled manipulation of the photons which the photo sensors can read.
For our project, we decided to have it so that a user could interact with the Sound Board by placing their hand between the light and the sensors, triggering the sounds to play. We grappled between whether to have it so that less light would play the notes, or more lights would do so, and ultimately decided that reducing the value of light sensed would create a somewhat more seamless interaction (though in the Discussion section below, we talk about how there were opportunities for greater interaction and play by doing it in the reverse - an easy fix which we designed our housing to accommodate). Ultimately, using this sound board was a simple hand swipe between light and sensor - a straightforward, intuitive and smoothly working concept.
The main materials gathered for this project included photo sensors, wiring, ITP-120 components, an RGB LED light strip, plywood, resistors, two breadboards and an Arduino microcontroller. Most of these materials were provided free of charge through ITP, with the exception being the LED light strip (which cost $37) and the plywood (which cost $15)
The total was $52
Building the circuit was rather simple, and required simply creating 4 circuits, a sound device and an LED strip that all connected together. Ultimately, we no longer needed the sound device, as we used the Laptop MIDI application's sound for our final iteration of this project.
