Strands

Strands was an extension of the Within 2 art project I collaborated with artist Tarek Atoui. In the exploration of generating different timbres and creating instruments which give physical feedback, I designed the Strand board. Emulating stalks of wheat in a field, you can stroke your hand through the acrylic rods, creating frequencies of different pitch(x direction), volume(y direction), and timbre(magnitude of oscillation created by spring back in the individual stalks).

This instrument brought to life a concept which is hard to understand as timbre, often described as the color of a sound, is not something which a tangible qualia can be ascribed to.

For this a custom PCB was built that would: interface with 16 potentiometers to 6 Analog to Digital Converters, collate this data over SPI, transfer the information to an arduino microcontroller, which would then communicate over serial to MaxMSP to generate sounds.