water activated sound
My final project for Lalya Gaye’s Sound, Media, Urban Space class was a system of switches that are closed when water moves across the surface.
The first thing I did was to spray my material with a fixative spray. This made me think about the final application for the project. One of the immediate thoughts was that since the material is water proof it could become a wearable. Imagine a yellow rain coat that makes music as you walk through the rain…
After the spray dried I began to sew lines of conductive thread throughout the fabric. These lines become the positive / negative switches for the project. I’ve included a diagram below:
Once the conductive thread was sewn in it was time to connect the lines to the Arduino. I connected all the positive wires to the ports of the Arduino and all the ground wires to the single ground wire on the Arduino.
On the Arduino itself I used Paul Badger’s TONE library to generate sound when water closes circuits. Paul’s library generates frequencies which the speaker can read as sound.
http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Main/Freqout
The final flow went something like this:
WATER -> FABRIC -> CONDUCTIVE SWTICH -> ARDUINO – > SPEAKER
The next stage will be to think about how this system can be integrated into something wearable. It never occurred to me to use conductive thread inside of the fabric. Making custom textiles with conductive fabric can eliminate the need to sew wire into canvas and allow things to be better embedded into the piece.
Check back for future updates during the wearable computing class where I will be trying to create textiles that have positive / negative switches embedded inside of it.
Below is an image gallery of my process.
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