Have you ever been on a city street and seen a busker playing music on glasses? Each glass has a different amount of water and produces a different note when tapped. [Cyberlab] must have seen them and created an Arduino robot to play tunes on glasses. You can see the result in the video below.
If we had done this, we might have had a solenoid per glass or used some linear component like a 3D printer axis to pick different glasses. [Cyberlab] did something smarter. The glasses go in a circle and a stepper motor points at the correct glass and activates a solenoid. The result is pretty good and it is a lot simpler than any of our ideas.
If you aren’t musically inclined, you might wonder how you’d program the songs. There’s an example of taking a music box score from a website — apparently, there are lots of these — and removing any polyphony from it. The site mentioned even has an editor where you can import MIDI files and work with them to produce a music box strip that you could then convert. Then you encode each note as a number from 0 to 6.
Of course, you also have to fill your glasses with the right amount of water. A piano tuning phone app should be useful. We’ve seen this done in a linear fashion before. You can even use a single glass for many notes with a little ingenuity.
I was kind of hoping that it would some how have a some sort of rubber or leather finger and be playing the glasses with friction rather than percussively.
It would be tempting to make this with uranium glass and UV LEDs, but no doubt glasses fine enough to resonate, that are also made of uranium glass, would be unobtainium and prohibitively expensive. The old style pint pub beer glasses seem to work pretty well, in the absence of fine wine glasses, their extra depth and more linear construction, would make for a longer scale and easier tuning.
Do you need to use heavy water as a tuning fluid?
B^)
Nice! Especially nice that the stepper and servo are very quiet compared the the music itself – often where projects fall down!
I wonder if a dampened solenoid might be an interesting way to go. Although I guess shattered glass might be the result.
Absolute Genius! It looks so simple and mechanically it is, but, as usual, getting there required an awful lot of work!
The machine can be improved to play 2 notes simultaneously – add one more hand from above ;)
add six solenoids and you have full polyphony ;) But the solution with the rotating arm is fun to watch.
Awesome.