Auto Xylophone with Homemade Solenoids

[flats]

Pretty cool! FWIW, this is a glockenspiel or bells (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glockenspiel), not a xylophone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylophone).

[waffletower]

Sorry to upvote a pedantic comment, but the instrument here is definitely not a wood or kelon xylophone, and is instead a glockenspiel. The solenoid striking scheme would probably need to be slightly different for a xylophone, to avoid wear on the more delicate keys. A softer, rounded tip, needing more clearance beneath, would probably be required. Marimbas and vibraphones would require even softer strikes as well. Really great project!

[bambax]

Very cool project! But I would dispute this:

> buying 24 Solenoids is quite expensive

They're about $1-2 apiece on Aliexpress; I doubt making your own can cost much less?

In my experience, making one solenoid is fun just to see how it works (and how simple it is, really); but making more than one is a little painful and not fun.

[jstanley]

Personally I avoid buying direct from China whenever possible because I want parts quickly so that I can make progress on the project.

The cheapest solenoids I can see on Amazon Prime are about £5 each. 24 of those would be over £100.

Plus, the stated goal of the project is to learn a bit more about electromagnetism, so making your own solenoids is not even a bad idea.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Pat Metheny made an album called Orchestrion using an entire orchestra/band of real instruments played by solenoids over MIDI. Great music. (If you like Pat Metheny.)

It was an insane project. He even took it on tour.

The actual build was by Eric Singer and his team.

https://www.wired.com/2010/01/orchestrion/

[qkucy]

Although I missed seeing the Orchestrion tour in the 2010s, Pat still takes a subset of these instruments on tour with him. Both of his two previous tours, Side Eye and Dream Box had parts of the concert that had robotic percussion and wind instruments.

[hellotheretoday]

Aphex twin did a similar project with “computer controlled music”

[Jemm]

  "I used to hate electromagnetism"

Not a sentence I expected to hear today.

[amelius]

Without it, life as we know it is not possible.

[Waterluvian]

It’s like the best homemade doorbell ever!

[dtgriscom]

I have a full octave of organ pipes, and I've always dreamed of making an instrument out of it. I've just never figured out how to make the electrically-actuated valves.

[seabass-labrax]

Which pipes are these, out of interest?

As for electronic control, it shouldn't be too hard - perhaps you already know the following, but I'll write it here in case it's useful. You'll need as many electromagnetic solenoids as you have pipes. First you need to construct a 'wind chest', which is a shallow, air-tight box that can be made of any material. A plastic storage tub should do fine. Then you punch a hole in the top of the wind chest for each pipe, and make some sort of grommet to hold the pipes in place in the holes; this would be a 'toe board' on a real pipe organ. Mount the solenoids directly under the holes, and attach something soft to squish up against the pipe and stop the airflow. You of course need to have a blower that can pressurise the wind chest.

No guarantees about how that's going to sound! :) If you wanted to construct something really high-quality, you could follow Raphi Giangiulio, who has documented every stage of his fully-mechanical tracker organ: http://www.rwgiangiulio.com/index.htm

[worldmerge]

Have you seen Look Mum No Computer’s series on making an organ midi controlled?

[uoaei]

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W81jQN__88

The artist is Grandbrothers and one of them is a jazz pianist and the other one is a roboticist. The latter sets up systems to control solenoids striking the strings and body of a grand piano while the former plays on the keys. It's a duet between human and machine.

[syntaxing]

Fun project, they could have hand winded those solenoids which a drill instead…the end result would look way better

[markhahn]

I have to say, those are some ugly solenoids. Is it really that unusual/ocd to want them a little neater?

[waffletower]

The Yamaha Disklavier is a player piano that uses a similar solenoid actuation technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disklavier

[trollian]

This is something I've dreamed about doing in one form or another since I was a teenager almost 30 years ago.

But the best thing about this story is the video "Without the Xylophone" - a terrifying robotic bed of nails.

[chaosprint]

Looks very interesting. I see Arduino is used here. Do you feel the latency?

You can have a look at Daisy and Bela as well :)

[throwaway-42808]

Daisy and Bela are great for low-latency interactive audio :)

But I think Arduino is a good choice for this.

1. The microcontroller isn't generating audio onboard, it's driving solenoids to hit something. Arduino can do that — the solenoids have travel time but Bela wouldn't solve that.

2. This is more like a sequence playback machine, there's no continuous real-time interactivity. Play/pause is the main interaction and a few ms is ok.

(If you wanted to duet with it latency-free the top of the xylophone is completely exposed so you can just play it normally.)

[mungoman2]

Artificial Intelligence is mentioned in the intro, but was it actually applied?

[garba_dlm]

would it be possible to induce the vibration of the metal piece (assuming it's magnetic) without nails?

using very rapid magnetic oscillations (like a speaker??)?

I think the electronics would be different, but is it possible?

[throwaway-42808]

probably!

You might like the Magnetic Resonator Piano: http://instrumentslab.org/research/mrp.html

[jurgenkesker]

Very nice way of showing the build progress with the animated gifs.