This past weekend I attended the maker faire - a 2-day extravaganza of overly excited nerds showing off the cool stuff they'd made. It was incredibly fun experience and one that I would highly recommend. All of the exhibits were inspiring, but there was one that really stood out - an exhibit that you simply could not miss. This exhibit is a beautiful blend of music and math - A giant stage where music is played through Tesla Coils.
The show starts with a man wearing a chain mail suit walks in with an electric guitar. The guitar has a Faraday cage over part of the strings, and there are two giant towers on either side of the stage. When he starts playing, one million volts of electricity flow through the Tesla coils and on to his guitar and suit as a shockingly loud note fills the room. Arcs of electricity resembling white lightning come out from the Tesla coils and hit his suit. The combination of loud music and visuals of the Tesla coils emitting electricity is almost overwhelming.
The people who made the show are a bunch of very techy musicians. They love music, but also love physics and engineering and, you know, building Tesla coils. They found a creative way to combine their love of both physics and music in to one job. It is very possible, and could possibly be a future path for me.
To Alexander
ReplyDeleteI would like to reassure that there shall always be physics with music. After all, music is the concurrent vibrations of harmonic frequencies through different media. The use of Tesla coils merely makes this connection more obvious, as well as more noticeable in the other regard (that is to say loud).
There are, however, similarly conceived instruments if you are interested. The glass harmonica, for example, as devised by Benjamin Franklin uses the different frequencies of glass bowls to create a sort of organ using the rubbing of finger across the rims of the bowls. The ever popular theremin employs both hands to serve as plates in capacitors, attached to oscillators controlling frequency and amplitude. However, my personal favorite would be the corrugaphone, also known as the whirly tube or the lasso d'amore. I know you are familiar with it, but I'll explain what it is in case you don't know the name. It is a corrugated plastic tube, which when revolved, causes the Bernoulli effect. The suction of the air within the tube vibrates the air, and the speed at which the tube is revolved changes the note within the harmonic series of the tube. The best example of the use in actual music would have to be PDQ Bach, although comically. Either way, the use of physics within music can not be broken and innovations like Tesla coil music only aids that revelation.
Rex Gao