PRESS RELEASE

ThreePlay, known individually as Debbie Reid, Callum Brown and Shaun Bostock –young Product Designers studying at the University of Dundee. ThreePlay have created ‘The Percussion Box’ in response to an Interaction Design brief.  They considered an Interactive Product to be a physical object that listens and responds.

The Percussion Box consists of eight unique keys, each with a different sounding material mounted underneath: ceramic; oak; tin; acrylic; glass; bamboo; terracotta; and timber.  Each key is struck by a solenoid that is linked to a corresponding Light Dependant Resistor embedded on the interface of the box.

The user taps a rhythm onto an LDR, to which the box ‘listens, and remembers’. It responds, by hitting a solenoid off of the material on that key, mimicking and looping this rhythm, enabling the user to listen to and visualize their original rhythm.  The user can then move on to a different key, tapping a separate rhythm, in turn building up a unique percussive beat.

The interaction between the user and the machine plays on a particular human habit: tapping on objects during boredom or impatience.  The Percussion Box sparks curiosity, as the user is unable to see what material is under each key, encouraging them to further interact and learn how this curiosity works.

The electronics have been a hindrance of late.  Shaun and myself toiled for a long time over it recently (see photo), where we managed to get each circuit working perfectly on its own (we have one circuit duplicated for each key), however, when we ran each one off of the same power supply they wouldn’t work i.e. started behaving oddly.  We ran two off of the same power supply and the same thing happened.

In response to this we gathered four power supplies - kindly donated by other groups who weren’t using them, intending just to use four of the eight keys on the percussion box as this would still demonstrate our idea successfully.  One circuit then stopped working so we are down to three working keys at the moment.

On a more positive note I have outdone myself and managed to program the circuits in such a way that they only start to record the user tapping a rhythm when they first tap the LDR, and to re-record their rhythm all they would have to do is hold their finger over the LDR while it is looping.

Up next is the Press Release and Photos to go along with it.

Callum

This is yet another video that I found on Core77 (which used to be my second favourite design blog to read until ‘The {Design} Blog’ changed its website layout for the worse). Again, it relates to Interaction Design.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS1exujG3cY&feature=player_embedded

Who doesn’t want to have a play with them!

-Debbie

The two halves of the Percussion Box have now been reunited. Hooray! I’d like to say it went perfectly, but I managed to snap off some of the keys. I glued them back on with UHU glue (the only glue that can attach anything to anything, for example a blender to a horse, but not paper to paper), only to discover that UHU is great for taking spray paint off as well. Not so great for us seeing as our box had been spray painted black. I tried to cover up my error by painting over the huge white spaces with nail varnish,  I’m now afraid to say that the hinges are in a little bit of a mess. Oops… The hinges by the way are only 15mm, teeny weeny! We had to order them from a dolls house hobby site which was a great idea, rather than making our own or having a huge strip hinge to cut up.

The boys built a plinth for the Percussion Box to sit on, this way we are able to hide the cumbersome breadboards and power supply.  Painting things of that scale with a tiny paintbrush should seriously be the new fitness craze, my arm is as strong as an ox now, I could probably take on the Hulk at arm wrestling.

Our press release has been written and edited and I’ll get that up as soon as we’ve taken the pictures to compliment it. Stay tuned!

-Debbie

Things are beginning to come together at the moment, as they should I suppose - we have to hand our work in on Friday.  The box itself is nearing completion, having painted it (Debbie will upload photos soon), mounted the LDR’s in the holes drilled along the angled face, and mounted the solenoids inside (see photos), the electronics are the top priority.

Just like old times, electronics have been major grief.  The circuit and code we are using can be found here and are ideal, subject to some tweaking, although the chip’s memory is full to capacity with this code so we’ve had to upgrade to a bigger chip with more memory.  After a long long time tinkering with said chip (it just would not work) we have purchased eight new ones which appear to work as they should.  Today was spent, with the help of Mike, pondering over the coding of the electronics, so its almost there with just a couple of things to sort out - most notably ensuring the LDR’s work properly in the circuit.

Au Revoir…

The box is now complete so I spent most of yesterday and today sanding and painting, sanding and painting and yes - even more sanding and painting. It’s going to be sprayed black, with the inside of the keys being white to accentuate their up and down movement. With the keys being made of engineering foam and the materials being quite heavy, the solaniods aren’t strong enough to make them bounce very high. It’ll also be a nice visual play on piano keys.

I found some interesting vidoes that sort of relate to our project. The first video, http://www.geschoir.de/soundobjects/ , is a project about every day objects that have been given curious sound abilities. The other video that also caught my eye, http://hackaday.com/2010/03/30/analog-tape-playing-glove/ , is about a magnetic glove that plays old cassette tape. The actual tape is presented in such a way that someone could mistake it for a stylish art piece, I like it. The concentration on some of the users faces while they’re playing is just brilliant and some of them get really into it too as they discover interesting sounds on the tape. I’d love a go on it.

- Debbie

Shaun and Callum have been working really hard down in the workshop and have so far managed to create the lids for our percussion box.

I acquired some tiles from the local tile shop free of charge as they were a little bit broken. I’ve sawed them up, and single handedly managed to blunt 3 hacksaw blades. I was meant to get the technician to use the tile cutter, but as it’s been pouring down for the last few days and the machine needs to be taken outside, so I grew impatient. I’ve also collected some metal from a tin of tuna and a can of juice, a string of tiny bells and some acrylic. There’s eight lids though so the search for materials continues!

- Debbie

No.3 of the five sound recordings, again made by the bongo drum on the far right of the picture (five posts ago).

No.2 of the five sound recordings, made by the bongo drum on the far right of the picture (five posts ago).

As I said before, it would be impossible to use the mp3 player for our percussion box, as you can’t program it in such a way that it would play sound simultaneously with the movement of the solenoid.  We then thought that we’d have to use a program called ‘PureData’, which is computer based and works alongside circuit, so for instance you could press a button on screen to light up an LED on the circuit.

But we’ve recently been developing the form of the percussion-box, and from this we’ve decided to completely do away with pre-recorded sounds and incorporate different materials into the percussion box for the solenoids to hit off of, which will naturally give a different sound anyway.  We are now looking at the musical properties of a few different materials such as wood, stone, slate, glass, metal, tin, rubber, and even bells on strings, which is proving productive enough to allow us to begin making the box.

Having spent a long, dull time today pondering over how it could be made, with the help of Sean K,  we’re now quite confident that a full day in workshop tomorrow will see it coming to fruition.  If all goes well, the box will have a subtly curved top in place of the angular one seen in the video above.

This video was made as part of our ‘play’ hand-in, where we had to demonstrate the concept of our music maker.  At this stage, we hadn’t yet rid ourselves of the gastly thought of using PureData with pre-recorded sounds, so it’s been dubbed with our own home-made sound recordings.  But for argument’s sake, it could well be any of the materials mentioned above hidden underneath each lid that makes the sounds!

Enjoy…

Callum

Apparently this tumblr thing only allows us to upload one audio file per day, which is nice, so I’ll endeavor to include the remaining four percussion-box sounds over the next, err… (4x1???)… four days.

Callum

No.1 of the five sounds we’ve recorded so far for the percussion box.  It was made using the shaker on the far left of the picture (two posts-ago).

This was our first prototype for the percussion box, where we were only concentrating on using pre-recorded sounds (which I will upload soon), and playing them through the mp3 player simultaneously with a working solenoid. 

One significant problem is that the code used for the mp3 player, although it is generally quite easily changed in places, it doesn’t allow sound to be played simultaneously with the solenoid, which is obviously important for the percussion box.  The mp3 player code has various different sections, so we experimented by putting a solenoid code only in one section of the code, then only in the following section, and so on, just to see if we could manage to get the solenoid to to work along with sound.  It would appear that it’s impossible to do this, as there is a kind of ‘preperation’ time before each sound plays, which is around a quarter of a second, and it cannot be avoided.

This here video illustrates what I’m talking about. Its quite difficult to hear, just because of the sound I’ve used, but the higher pitch sound that is made as the lid falls closed is being played out of the mp3 player.

Callum

These are the instruments I used to record the sounds for the percussion box.  Its interesting the amount of different sounds that can be achieved using three percussive instruments.