Musical Flower Pots
From On-signal: Projects & Research
Authors
- Noam Knoller
- Alun Owen
- Nina Serebrenick
- Arjan Scherpenisse
Description
This project was realized during the Hybrid Toys Workshop at Mediamatic.
The only instruction is that you align the pins to the pot, go ahead and play! The group had no formal presentation, but what resulted was that all the workshop participants started playing with the flowers and putting them in the pots. The result was a sound explosion. "You are a real florist" one of the participants reaction. An interesting project as on the one hand you can think about the visual aspect of the project [bringing the flowers to form a bunch] and on the other hand you become a musical composer. With this project it was especially cool to see that everyone indeed starting playing!
The architecture: Every pot has three RFID readers, every slot has a reader and they are all connected to the computer. Each flower has an RFID tag. Every pot has its own sample sound. Each flower has a pitch tuned according to their color. The tone is like the black keys of the piano. There is one flower with a Wii controller that registers the shake and this determines the pace of sound.
Technical details
The project was made using 6 SonMicro RFID usb readers, corresponding RFID tags, and Processing code producing the sounds. For the interaction with the WiiMote we used Osculator and the OSCp5 library.
The source code was written in the Processing language, which basically is a precompiler for Java. There are several classes, corresponding to real-life objects: Pot, and Flower. A class FlowerController was made which held instances of these classes. The code is very modular, adding an extra flower is a single line of code; adding a new Pot too.
The code is released in the public domain, and may be used by anyone who finds a use for it. I would like it if your use the code, that you e-mail me whether or not you like it.
Download the source code here (600kb, including sound files).
