This academic
article, from the University of Victoria's Music Intelligence and Sound
Technology Interdisciplinary Center (MISTIC) explores the concept of automatic
mechanical instruments through history. It describes what elements of
acoustics, electrics, programming, and mechanical design are important in
building a wide variety of robotic instruments, from percussion to string to
wind instruments. In the Wind Robots section of the article, The Mubot, a robot
designed by Makoto Kajititani in Japan and developed at Waseda University,
which preforms the clarinet and Roger Dannenberg's pneumatic bagpipes,
developed in 2004 by Dannenberg and his team at Carnegie Mellon are two
examples of self-actuated wind instruments mentioned in the article.
Microtonal Musical Robot: Cornet
In 2008, Dr.
Godfried-Willem Raes, a researcher at Ghent University College School of Arts
and Logos foundation in the Netherlands, with much experience in building
automated musical instruments led a team to automate a cornet. The team mounted
the cornet and three solenoids, which controlled the notes, in a frame built
specifically for the project. They used a small motor-speaker compressor to
provide air flow into the cornet and MIDI software to send notes to the
solenoids.
Controlling A Solenoid Valve With Arduino
This
tutorial breaks down programming solenoids with arduinos very simply. While the
code shown here is using only one solenoid (Pin 4), we are using 8, so our
setup void function and pin definition at the beginning of the code are longer.
We also have separate void functions for each of our notes, but the same
notation (digitalWrite(solenoidPin, HIGH)) is all the same.