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A display that makes noise
Nowadays, our screens are utterly silent, as even the faint coil whine from cathode ray tube televisions was replaced by LCD and OLED displays a couple decades ago. After receiving a pair of AlphaZeta flip displays as a gift in 2021, Hannah Robertson put them on a shelf and showed data that one would expect to see, including temperature, weather, and the date. And since then, Robertson noticed how the number of dots changing concurrently affects the sound profile produced by the displays: one dot/segment makes a soft click whereas many dots/segments create a loud whirring/clacking noise, respectively.
Finding the right music
Based on this intriguing pattern, Robertson knew that it could be transformed from a purely visual display into something that combines music and artful graphics. The percussive nature of the shifting dots and segments lent itself well to a genre of music known as “Clapping Music” wherein two performers gradually change their rhythm to create a shifting, phasing sound that gets more intense after several repetitions.
Showing sound
Given how this style of music is performed by just two people, Robertson assigned her dot-based display as the unchanging clapper and the segment-based one as the second, shifting clapper. As for the code, the base clapping pattern is a simple pattern that determines when the dots/segments should flip. When a 1 is encountered, a preset number of random elements change orientation on the target display, whereas a 0 skips setting anything. And at the end of each repetition, the segment-based display’s offset is incremented to produce the shift.
Powering everything is a Raspberry Pi Zero W that has been preconfigured as an AlphaZeta display controller- complete with a self-hosted web interface. In order to achieve fine-grained control over the matrices, the Pi executes a custom Julia script that runs through a predefined rhythm and outputs the control signals over serial to the awaiting displays.
Playing the “Variant B” pattern
Another electro-mechanical project?
Due to the success of this project, Robertson hopes to carry some of the lessons she learned into future designs that incorporate electro-mechanical percussion with striking visuals. To see more about how this flip-dot instrument was created, you can read its blog post here.
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