Everybody loves music (who does not really?). Well, my colleague Sarah and I really like it too, especially went it is played on a cheesy home stereo system. What is great about listening music on those is that most of the time, you can enjoy a superbe colorful animation of music frequencies like this one:

we were inspired by this symbol of modern music love to build a Physical Equalizer that would probably look like this:

The equalizer will be made of:

• a series of 6 or 9 weight sensors;
• a minimum of 20 blocks (material of which to be confirmed after sensors sensitivity tests.

We will be working with weight sensors and map their readings to create a variation in the sound when the user put a block on top of each other. We are still in the process of defining with which sensors we will work.

We tried the flex sensitive resistors but they are too sensitive and their readings are really fickle.

We found a load sensor that can weight until 40-50 kilograms. They seem pretty contants. But we do not know if their readings will be accurate will lower weight. We will test them this week.

We also found this pocket electronic scale. Some of those can wight until 20 kilograms. We ordered the one that can go up to 5 kilograms. We will test it this week as well.

The blocks

The block size and weight will depend on the sensitivity of the sensors we will use. There are plenty of options. They can be made of wood, resin, concrete, glass, etc.

Most probably they will be of a size of 10 centimeters x 10 centimeters. The could look like this:

or like this:

Our ideal scenario would be to have blocks with an LED inside that would adjust its color according to which stack it has been put on:

The sound/music

We are gonna be testing two different types of sound. We will try to have our equalizer to vary frequencies of existing songs. When the user would stack the blocks, they would hear a song they know being transformed.

We will also try to create our own sounds so the user will construct his own music architecture.