Making coils more musical
This is a modal window.
The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.
Formal Metadata
| Title |
| |
| Title of Series | ||
| Number of Parts | 85 | |
| Author | ||
| License | CC Attribution 3.0 Germany: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/38087 (DOI) | |
| Publisher | ||
| Release Date | ||
| Language |
Content Metadata
| Subject Area | ||
| Genre | ||
| Abstract |
|
5
6
11
12
13
14
16
17
23
24
25
27
29
30
31
32
35
39
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
49
50
51
52
55
56
58
59
60
63
65
66
67
69
72
73
74
76
79
81
82
84
00:00
TelecommunicationChaos (cosmogony)Musical ensembleView (database)JSONXMLUML
00:37
Musical ensembleGoodness of fitSoftware engineeringMusical ensembleBitSystem callJSONXMLUMLLecture/Conference
01:26
MIDIControl flowGame controllerBitPhysical systemLevel (video gaming)State of matterDiagramArithmetic meanModule (mathematics)Game controllerBit rateKeyboard shortcutLecture/Conference
02:09
Scheduling (computing)Pulse (signal processing)Linear mapMusical ensembleForm (programming)WordAsynchronous Transfer ModeLecture/Conference
03:11
Metropolitan area networkComputer animationLecture/Conference
03:43
Magneto-optical drivePulse (signal processing)Scheduling (computing)Coma BerenicesForm (programming)SoftwareWordAbstractionBitRepresentation (politics)Power (physics)Control systemCore dumpModule (mathematics)Moment (mathematics)Lecture/ConferenceComputer animation
04:41
RobotSound effectBitRoboticsDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Multiplication signSystem callLecture/ConferenceComputer animation
05:28
RobotData miningRoboticsGame controllerMultiplication signLecture/ConferenceComputer animation
06:03
String (computer science)Slide ruleRoboticsSound effectLecture/Conference
06:36
Square numberRoboticsFigurate numberTheoryLecture/Conference
07:20
RobotControl flowMIDIIntegrated development environmentVideoconferencingTelecommunicationChaos (cosmogony)TheoryPhysicalismVideoconferencingSound effectNoise (electronics)ArmMusical ensembleIntegrated development environmentMIDIPhysical systemInteractive televisionCommunications protocolSoftware developerParticle systemSpeech synthesisSystem callComputer animation
08:21
TelecommunicationChaos (cosmogony)User interfaceIdeal (ethics)Loop (music)SoftwareArmBitProgrammschleifeComputer hardwarePoint (geometry)Projective planeUser interface1 (number)Lecture/ConferenceComputer animation
09:34
Expert systemComputer hardwareTelecommunicationChaos (cosmogony)Expert systemLogic gateDevice driverUniverse (mathematics)Different (Kate Ryan album)2 (number)Lecture/Conference
10:11
Expert systemBuildingInternet forumTelecommunicationChaos (cosmogony)Goodness of fitDreiphasensystemWater vaporFunction (mathematics)Data miningParameter (computer programming)Perturbation theoryPhase transitionPower (physics)Meeting/Interview
10:46
EvaporationIntegrated development environmentNeuroinformatikMainframe computerHand fanVideoconferencingMultilaterationConnectivity (graph theory)Arc (geometry)Core dumpCASE <Informatik>Lecture/ConferenceComputer animation
11:20
Key (cryptography)Element (mathematics)Power (physics)Physical systemConnectivity (graph theory)Sound effectSheaf (mathematics)FrequencyVector spaceNoise (electronics)ResultantMultiplication signGame controllerOcean currentCross-correlationVirtual machineBitArc (geometry)Lecture/Conference
12:37
Digital electronicsPower (physics)Ocean currentParameter (computer programming)Computer engineeringKälteerzeugungScaling (geometry)DiagramMoment (mathematics)Computer-assisted translationTerm (mathematics)Computer animation
13:25
Code division multiple accessDevice driverPower (physics)Right angleCuboidLogic gateMultiplication signCASE <Informatik>VoltmeterLecture/ConferenceComputer animation
14:04
Control flowSound effectPower (physics)WaveformPhysical systemProgramming paradigmMultiplicationSoftware testingEndliche ModelltheorieCASE <Informatik>Computer animationLecture/Conference
14:59
CASE <Informatik>Core dumpVideoconferencingGoodness of fitPhysical systemLecture/Conference
15:28
Control flowMIDIPhysical systemBit rateModule (mathematics)Sound effectPoint (geometry)View (database)Computer animation
16:10
MIDIControl flowTelecommunicationChaos (cosmogony)Formal languageNumberSolid geometryCausalityNegative numberSoftware bugGodMultiplication signCommunications protocolSerial portLecture/ConferenceComputer animation
16:46
MIDIGame controllerCommunications protocolSerial portMessage passingParticle systemSerial portLogic synthesisKeyboard shortcutComputer animation
17:17
Chord (peer-to-peer)VolumeControl flowPatch (Unix)WaveformTelecommunicationChaos (cosmogony)MathematicsGroup actionKeyboard shortcutFunctional (mathematics)Physical systemPoint (geometry)Personal identification numberGame controllerVolume (thermodynamics)Core dumpESPRIT <Forschungsprogramm>Lecture/ConferenceComputer animation
18:28
DemosceneFilter <Stochastik>FrequencyCombinational logicDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Game controllerWaveformFunction (mathematics)OscillationBitForm (programming)Volume (thermodynamics)Flow separationVideoconferencingPositional notationLecture/Conference
19:14
Limit (category theory)Control flowVolumeChord (peer-to-peer)AerodynamicsPrimitive (album)Dynamical systemPoint (geometry)Multiplication sign1 (number)Self-organizationPrototypePrincipal idealComputer animation
19:49
PrototypeControl flowVolumeLength of stayWaveformLogic synthesisType theoryPhysical systemRegular graphSpacetimeDynamical systemLogic synthesisOscillationDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Volume (thermodynamics)Multiplication signMultiplicationGame controllerAsynchronous Transfer ModeLecture/ConferenceComputer animation
20:46
Demo (music)Metropolitan area networkMusical ensembleYouTubeMultiplicationVideoconferencingSampling (statistics)OscillationMathematicsComputer animationLecture/Conference
21:36
Demo (music)ResultantNoise (electronics)Workstation <Musikinstrument>Configuration spaceOscillationCASE <Informatik>VideoconferencingWaveformMultiplication signTriangleComputer simulationFunctional (mathematics)Term (mathematics)Lecture/ConferenceComputer animation
23:29
Image resolutionSawtooth waveVideoconferencingVideo gamePhysical systemBendingImage resolutionLecture/ConferenceComputer animation
23:58
WaveformSimulationMedical imagingGame controllerGroup actionPosition operatorDisk read-and-write headLecture/Conference
24:33
Physical systemBitComputer hardwareMereologyGame controllerPrototypeGreatest elementGoodness of fitLecture/Conference
25:06
Chaos (cosmogony)Power (physics)MathematicsLimit (category theory)Range (statistics)Physical systemLevel (video gaming)ParadoxSoftwareForm (programming)Software testingWaveformLecture/Conference
25:42
Key (cryptography)Connected spaceMIDIRight angleVideo-CDElement (mathematics)Musical ensembleService (economics)Power (physics)Web pageKeyboard shortcutMultilaterationLecture/Conference
26:24
Source codeCrash (computing)BitMatrix (mathematics)Data miningInformation extractionBit rateMultiplication signLecture/ConferenceComputer animation
26:53
Online helpInformation extractionPhysical systemProjective planeLine (geometry)Source codeReading (process)Lecture/Conference
27:32
Entire functionPhysical systemFlow separationGame controllerCuboidFrequencyMaxima and minimaLecture/Conference
28:04
Source codeCrash (computing)SoftwareFrequencyConnected spaceFlow separationInstallation artDigital electronicsComputer animationLecture/Conference
28:36
Communications protocolMIDIPhysical systemAsynchronous Transfer ModeField (computer science)Lecture/Conference
29:14
Order (biology)Table (information)Projective planeMIDICuboidForcing (mathematics)Physical systemGame controllerExistential quantificationLecture/Conference
30:01
DisintegrationMultiplicationControl flowoutputMoment (mathematics)VideoconferencingPhysical systemMIDIState of matterStandard deviationDigitizingINTEGRALWorkstation <Musikinstrument>Computer animationLecture/Conference
30:47
Multiplication signGame controllerComputer configurationoutputModule (mathematics)Configuration spaceMathematicsBit rateClosed setLecture/Conference
31:17
DisintegrationControl flowMultiplicationoutputComputer animationLecture/Conference
31:49
WaveWebsitePower (physics)Point (geometry)AreaInformation securityReal numberVideoconferencingLecture/Conference
32:43
Multiplication signProcess (computing)BitMoment (mathematics)System callPhysical systemReading (process)CASE <Informatik>Lecture/Conference
33:16
Endliche ModelltheorieTwitterFreewareTorusRight anglePoint (geometry)1 (number)VoltmeterView (database)Control flowData miningLecture/Conference
34:15
Object (grammar)Field (computer science)MereologyData miningLecture/Conference
34:46
Endliche ModelltheorieDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Sound effectArc (geometry)Interactive televisionVery-high-bit-rate digital subscriber lineFrame problemPhysical systemMathematicsCASE <Informatik>MereologyLecture/Conference
36:00
VideoconferencingOvalMultiplication signSystem callWordBitLecture/Conference
36:33
Drum memoryPower (physics)Hill differential equationMusical ensemblePhysical systemVideoconferencingDemo (music)Covering spaceOscillationPoint (geometry)MultiplicationNeighbourhood (graph theory)Asynchronous Transfer ModePrimitive (album)Vector spaceMilitary baseStructural loadAreaVideo gameFrequencySound effectFreezingLecture/Conference
38:35
HypermediaRoundness (object)Closed setLecture/ConferenceJSON
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:14
I have next to me Josh Bailey. He plays around with Tesla coils for fun, which is awesome, I think.
00:24
So we're going to see a lot of lightning indoor, a lot safer than outdoors. So you choose wisely. So we should have video, we should have audio, and we're all good to go. So give a very warm welcome to Josh Bailey.
00:48
Thank you. It's very good to be here. Although I'm off to a strong start, I haven't even started talking and we've already had an emergency. So I guess that's good. Okay. So my name is Josh Bailey, sorry, I'll come down a bit.
01:01
I'm a software engineer for Google based in New Zealand. It's a very small office. My CAD also helps. And for some hobbies, I play around with Tesla coils. And what I want to try and show you this evening is a bit of demonstration and discussion about trying to make coils perhaps a bit more musical.
01:21
This is kind of based around, I think a lot of people have been playing music on coils for a while. And I think the level of technology has been, it's amazing that it works at all. So I made some friends with some musicians and we tried to push the state of the art a bit. So I'm not sure if it's a good musical direction, but we'll see what you think.
01:44
So this system is so complex, I can't even begin to explain it as signified by this diagram. What I'll describe is a system where we have a musician, a keyboard controller, something called chime red, which is the synthesizer module, and then a Tesla coil.
02:05
And as you can see, the musician is physically and logically isolated from the coil, because we don't want to kill the musician. That's bad form. And I'll just give a very brief demonstration of a couple of clips so you can see how
02:23
it sounds. So I'm not sure how it's gonna sound on these speakers, but I guess let's try it.
03:11
So I guess that works. There's another mode, which is also useful for protecting your car.
03:42
Okay, you kind of get the idea. Thank you. So I'll try and explain a little bit further. So I'm a software engineer, I'm not a musician. And what I've tried to do is go talk to some musicians and have them explain to me
04:03
in small words that I can understand what things that they need, what abstractions they need from the control system to make it sound interesting, and to actually use the coil as a synthesizer. And the first feature, actually, just to call out here, what I'm doing is, if you don't
04:23
remember anything else about the presentation, the synth module is very, very carefully and precisely controlling the amount of power going into the coil from moment to moment. This is really, really, really important. Put too much power or get it wrong by a millionth of a second and there's running and screaming, hopefully some from the audience or the musician.
04:45
And not enough, and you don't get these interesting audio effects. So I'll explain a bit more in detail what those are.
05:00
Okay, in this next little clip, what we did is try something a little bit different. When one coil is not enough and two is too low, you need three coils at the same time. And why not add a robot drummer and a robot bass player? So in this performance, we tried to get all these robot instruments to play together.
05:21
We had some problems. The drummer did catch on fire. We just noticed this during a practice session. The coils jammed the robot's controller, so it jammed hard on and the actuator caught on fire.
05:41
That was a bit sad. But the robot bass player survived kind of okay. So this is a composition by a friend of mine called Jason Long in New Zealand. And the bass player was built by my friends James McVay and Jim Murphy. So I'll just play you a little snippet so you can see them all working together.
06:00
And if we have time at the end, I'd be happy to play the whole clip. Okay, what you're looking at first just before I start is the robot bass player. So it has four strings there.
06:22
You can see an actuator there that rotates the picks. And there are fingers that travel along the slides there so it can play.
07:03
I've got to say, while I'm proud of the coils, I'm really envious of the robot bass player. It does tend to try and wander around the room as it plays. It's quite vigorous.
07:20
Okay, a brief foray into Tesla coil theory. So just a summary of what I'm going to talk about. So what do I mean by music? So first thing is, as I mentioned, I'm not a musician. So I don't actually know what I mean by music. I'm just trying to make some interesting noises. So I hope they're enjoyable to you.
07:41
Some more demonstration videos of some individual effects so you can hear exactly what's happening. Just a very brief discussion of how coils actually make these various sounds. And some interesting things that we observed having the system interact with its environment. Put it that way. What the musician is able to do via the MIDI protocol, which is a standard protocol
08:04
for controlling musical instruments. And some future developments, including a prototype vocoder. So I'm not ready to show you that yet, but we have been able to make the coils speak. Which is extremely disturbing to be around.
08:24
Okay. And just to highlight, I consider myself an instrument maker. And I'm very keen to hear from musicians or other instrument makers or anybody on suggestions or things that could be made better. Okay.
08:41
Because I'm a software engineer, I get into a little bit of hardware. And here's the first problem that confronted me in this project. This is my idea of a user interface. This is the gate controller that goes very near the coil itself. As you can see, it's extremely complex. You have one switch for arming and safe.
09:03
There's a light to tell you if it's armed. And another light to tell you if the coil is firing. But probably if you're close enough to see that light come on, then you'll probably see some other lights before you go away. As you see here, there's a fiber optic cable here. And this is obviously very important to keep the coil electrically isolated from musicians
09:25
or anything around. Most musicians have to deal with ground loops at some point in their lives. Here we don't really want to include a high voltage loop as well. And just to really show you, I'm not a hardware expert.
09:42
So this is a or was a homemade gate driver for a coil. And this did actually work for several seconds. There is a there was a chip there that kind of went away into a different universe. Didn't come back. I actually kind of impressed that it's just gone.
10:02
Like it left some of the legs behind. So, yeah, I have no business going near any of this, but that doesn't stop me. And here's actually another I have to acknowledge a very good friend of mine, Patrick heard. So Patrick and I built a very large coil called parameter, which is 20 kilowatts.
10:24
So I have three phase power coming to my house, which is very convenient. And Patrick and I decided to make a coil to use that. And it runs a bit hot. So he water cooled it. And if you're interested, there's an article in Hackaday, which is quite interesting to
10:41
read by itself. There's some advanced technology there. As you can see, there's like a kind of a plastic water reservoir there. Some fans we ripped off a large computer cooler. Seems to work pretty well. Though I don't really like to go anywhere near it when it runs.
11:02
Okay. The sound itself. So what you're looking at here, this is a still of one of the coils playing in the videos I'll show you a bit later. So this is a very hot arc. The arc has actually stopped, but has actually set a lot of component gases and things in the air on fire.
11:22
And it's made quite an interesting visual effect, which was something that we were going for. Now, of course, this is something we don't want to happen too often. That means that we're switching a lot of power in there. That's pretty stressful on the components in the coil. So this is actually one of the key design elements in the system.
11:41
Coils of this design handle peak currents of many thousands of amps. So it's important to have a way to keep that down. And the coil makes its noise by explosively heating the air. So very, very rapidly heating the air as the arc passes through it. And we're controlling the sound or controlling the notes that it plays by just choosing exactly
12:04
when and for how long and over what period of time to add power to the arc. And also some many nonlinear things as well. The arc will move around as the air heats, as things come into contact with the arc.
12:22
And we explored making a machine for the coil to play with a bit to change the sound of the arc. So we haven't got too many results on that yet, but that's a topic of active research. So again, I know I keep saying I'm not a hardware engineer.
12:41
So here's one of my typical circuit diagrams, how a coil works. I'm sorry, the person is not to scale. So this one is actually of a parameter. In Tesla coil terms, it's called a offline Tesla coil. There's a big IGBT. They're essentially a big transistor, which controls the power.
13:02
This was quite interesting because it's about as large as a brick. Can handle a peak current of 10,000 amps, which we do actually use. And requires that I have an export license. So that's stuck to my refrigerator, which says that I promise not to make WMDs or anything else without the prior permission of Mitsubishi.
13:22
As long as Mitsubishi gets a cut, I guess it's okay. So the key thing to look at here, right in the center is the transistor which controls power. And there's a box down there, gate driver. And this is where most of the magic is, is deciding exactly when to turn that transistor on and off.
13:43
And in this case, it's going on and off maybe a few thousand times a second for maybe 25 to 35 microseconds at a time. So not very long at all. Oh, and I'm feeding it with a, in our case, a 20 kilowatt, 1000 volt power supply.
14:06
So yeah, just kind of in summary, to produce the sound, we need to control the power. We choose exactly when and for how long to turn the power on. And the thing that makes it actually interesting is you have to be very careful when you're
14:22
combining multiple notes, multiple waveforms. You can have a chord of death, just by having the musician hammer down all the keys, you could blow the system up. So the synth module's been specifically designed so that that will not happen. And that the sound is as consistent as possible while also using the least amount
14:42
of power and being as gentle on the components as possible. So I did, in a very early prototype with this, connect a guitar to it. I kind of bypassed a lot of these things. I thought, okay, this is gonna be great. I'll just do a quick test.
15:00
So I'll play owner of a lonely heart on there, because I'm old and from the 80s, so that's fine. But I'll play a couple of bars and then I'll video it. And I played a couple of bars and bang, the coil blew up. The power supply kind of left its case and went all across the room. And there was lots of gnashing of teeth and I couldn't even look at it for six months.
15:22
So that was a very good learning experience. Okay, so this leads to the system called Chime Red, which is the synthesizer module that enables all these audio effects. So I'll show you some demonstrations on some of the effects it enables.
15:45
Oh yeah, so why have this magic box at all? So from the musician's point of view, they don't want to know about high voltages or coils or duty cycles or any of that stuff. They just want to be able to have a great time and turn some knobs.
16:03
So that sounds like fun. So how do we do that? And also, actually, by the way, I tend to use Ableton, which I understand is actually written in Berlin, which is kind of cool. So I apologize if somebody is in the audience from Ableton. So I had a kind of negative experience.
16:20
Occasionally, we'd have some compatibility problems. And I'd be pretty certain that Ableton was the cause. So I'd log a bug with Ableton. And they'll say, what kind of synthesizer are you using? And I'm like, it's a coil. And they're like, did you try rebooting it? So I'm like, okay, I'll reboot the coil. It still does the same thing.
16:42
Okay, so just brief summary on something called MIDI. MIDI is a very simple serial cable style protocol. It's traditionally how it's done for connecting things like keyboards and synthesizers together. So it's just a way that we can provide some isolation
17:01
between what the musician is directly controlling, what they're touching, and what's happening at the high voltage end. So it's very, very simple. It's basically, it runs at about 33k. And you send bytes to say, start playing a note, stop playing a note, do something to a note,
17:21
like change its pitch, or change some function inside the synthesizer itself. And traditionally, it's over a little five pin DIN cable. It can run over USB and other things, though. So the main point of this is that you can actually use any MIDI capable system, any keyboard, with this, and it should work just fine.
17:45
All right, so to be musically interesting, my musician friends told me that they need some things. So the first thing is they need to be able to play many notes at once. And if you look at a lot of the coil controllers that you can buy now, they often have maybe one note,
18:05
or sometimes they can play two notes, so you can have both the notes. It's pretty advanced. But people really need much more than that. The next thing they say they need is controlling, if you like, to speak very loosely
18:21
the volume of each note, or very precisely the volume of the note as it's playing. So that's very, very important, rather than just playing at a fixed volume, which is what a lot of controllers do. Being able to change the pitch in various ways as it changes, including if you're a musician, be able to map a low frequency oscillator
18:43
with different waveforms to it. Maybe we will see some filters. And also being able to combine different kinds of waveforms together to give a more complex sound. So one of the videos that I first showed you right at the beginning, where we had a relatively small coil, but it was producing quite a rich kind of bass note.
19:02
That's what we were doing, is combining the output of several oscillators together. So I'll show you how those work. Okay, and as you summarize, the common notations as seen in other controllers is note dynamics, maybe only one or two notes at once,
19:21
and just one note, sorry, one oscillator per note. So quite just a simple tone. So we want to do better than that. Started in about 2012. We had a prototype called Pipe Organ that could do four notes at once. Started with note dynamics, but then we added some.
19:42
And last year we got to chime red after learning a lot and blowing up some silicon along the way. So it's not very beautiful. This is the original Pipe Organ prototype, which now sits on my desk to stop papers blowing away in the wind. But certainly learned a lot from it.
20:01
And actually what's inside there is basically just an Arduino. Chime red, the new system is an Arduino Dui. This is just a regular UNO in there. Okay, so now what I'm going to show you, this system can do 16 notes at once. You can assign multiple oscillators per note
20:22
and you can tune them. There's an FM synthesis mode, which is kind of exciting if you like. Some of these complex sounds that FM synthesis can give you. There are three LFOs with some features, which I'll demonstrate for you. And you get very fine control of the dynamics.
20:41
So you can control the volume over time in different ways. So what does all this mean? Okay, so I'm just going to play you a video of starting off with one oscillator per note. And then I'm going to add more oscillators
21:01
and then I'm going to move them around relative to the fundamental note. And so you'll hear the sound change.
21:37
You have to admit that results in many hours
21:41
with a drum machine and like a situation downstairs on my house just making noises like that. Trying to learn what to do with it. Okay, so another example here. In this case, I'm using a configurable low frequency oscillator to change the sound of those notes again. So what I'm doing is adding the oscillator,
22:03
changing its speed and its depth, and then also changing its waveform. So you hear it go from sine to triangle and also sawtooth. And it's kind of important because this allows you to simulate some drum sounds. So I have another video if we get time to it at the end where she shows the coil functioning as a drum machine.
23:29
There's a video. Thank you, I wasn't sure how that sound, but you probably hear this kind of like a scratchy raspy sawtooth sound towards the end which is kind of fun to play with.
23:42
It also sounds quite a lot more interesting live. This is more harmonics. Okay. Oh, so another feature is having very high resolution pitch bends. So this is actually how my friend Jim
24:02
did the car alarm simulation. He just went in with Ableton using the Ableton draw tool and just picked the notes that he wanted and then just very carefully kind of hand sculpted all the waveforms that they would sound the way that he wanted. I thought that was pretty nerdy and pretty cool.
24:21
But it's actually quite a nice learning experience for me is how electronic musicians want to work with the instrument. Like they really want to get in and have this very precise control. So what does the hardware look like? So this is the front panel here. The system has evolved a bit more
24:40
from that prototype that you first saw. So you have a nice key switch to be armed or safe controlling the coil. It's a lot more difficult to push the wrong button now. The coil will detect various unsafe conditions and stop commanding the coil, so that's good. Along the bottom there are three knobs there
25:03
and this allows you actually to control dynamically the upper limits and the amount of power that's being scheduled to the system. It also allows you to control the range of notes that the system's allowed to play. This is kind of important so that if you're playing around
25:21
with a new piece of software and you keep a wood that you don't accidentally hit a very high note or do something that involves a lot of power. You can be quite gentle. There's also a built-in signal generator kind of for testing so you can send arbitrary waveforms there. And here's the connectors on the back.
25:42
So apart from a fiber optic connection that goes to a dual-resonant style coil, there's another couple of connectors which are over to the right which are interesting. These are for controlling the 20 kilowatt one KVDC power supply. And how we test that is use MIDI
26:01
to play a commercial oven element. So you could hit a couple of keys and bam, just drop a whole lot of power into this element. It's how we make sure that before we actually played it live on the coil that we weren't gonna blow anything up except for an oven. So controlling large amounts of power by just playing a musical keyboard seems very wrong.
26:21
But that's what those connectors allow you to do. Okay, so there's a bit of an interesting side note here about why ChimeRead is called ChimeRead. So a friend of mine had to deal with IEDs
26:42
when he was on patrol. So very early on they gave his squad an IED jammer, just a GSM jammer, called Warlock Red, which is not used anymore. And it's not used anymore because if you turn it on it jams everything, including your own radio. So if something, it might stop an IED
27:02
but also stops you from calling for help if you need to. So people would never turn it on. And so this system's called ChimeRead because coils are horrible interference sources. When we were first doing performances with VJs, they'd go to a lot of trouble to set up these nice projectors, these very long HDMI runs, which are great antennas.
27:23
And I try and point out that I'm using a 20 kilowatt death ray, like about 20 feet away. And they're like, no, that should be fine. I'm like, well, let's see. So we'll play a couple of notes and bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, all go down the controllers. You will lose some fuses and everyone is running and screaming.
27:42
So there's some things you can do to minimize it. The controller itself, as you saw, is built into a metal box. It's kind of in a Tesla bomb shelter but that's no good for everybody else. So in a lot of live performances now we actually put the entire system in cages and for very large performances we put the musicians in a cage
28:01
and the coils on the outside just so there's some separation. Yeah, radio frequency just tends to get into everything. In my house I have a separate RF ground installed. The network connections downstairs to upstairs are fiber optic. There's a separate 100 amp three-phase circuit
28:21
that's specifically for coils and everything's on UPSs and everything else. And sooner or later things still get zapped. So pay your insurance. And this leads to a problem that was very familiar. I mentioned this earlier with Ableton.
28:41
So one of the problems with MIDI is that it's an unacknowledged protocol. If you send a command there's no way for the receiver to tell you that it got it. And this can lead to hanging notes. If you suddenly stop playing something doesn't get the note off and so the note continues to play.
29:00
On a regular synthesizer that's just annoying. On a coil that's pretty bad. You have that thing continuously run. So there are fail safes kind of built in the system to guard against that. And there's also a special Ableton mode that detects when Ableton has said something in the wrong order and just kind of silently fixes it up.
29:21
So something I'm considering doing and maybe as a side project is like a, because it's not just Ableton it seems to be quite a common problem is to have a MIDI rearranger box like MIDI comes in one side and it just has one light on it which says there I fixed it. Comes out the other end and just things just work. But it's quite common to see on MIDI devices
29:41
like a panic button and all this is is just to go like oh something's happened. Push this button, make everything stop. And our controller is not good enough so we have a system detect when there's a hanging note in and shut it down. Okay, so I think I've gone pretty rapidly through this.
30:02
So I've got some other videos I can show you but it'd be great to ask for your questions in a moment. But just before I do that, there's a paper on the system coming up in Texas in a couple of months. It was an interesting exercise
30:22
to figure out how to cite America's Got Talent. I feel kind of a bit wrong with that but that's apparently where we are. Is kind of a description of like the state of the art. But that'll be, that goes into some detail, through the detail on how the system works. Better digital audio workstation integration
30:41
so we hope to make it easier. So at the moment I just implement many things in the MIDI standard but I want to make it even easier than that so that you can configure an Ableton instrument for example and it has values in there that you can tweak and change very easily and automate. It'd be nice to be able to have multiple coils
31:02
from the same time grid. When we do multiple coils now, each one needs its own controller. So it'd be nice to have like an orchestra of death and make that scale, it'd be kind of nice. And also like I said, there's a PCM input module option. We can make the coil talk and blow a few fuses
31:23
so there's still some work to do but I hope to be able to show you that in the future. So before I go any further, thank you for listening and I'd love to take your questions if you got any.
31:46
So are there any questions for Josh? Come on, come up to the microphones. If you leave the room, stay quiet please.
32:02
Any questions, just wave your hands at the microphones, I can't see you. Ah, excellent. On the left side, please. We can't hear you yet. Okay. Try again?
32:21
Okay, all nice videos and stuff but I think most people here came like thinking maybe we see some awesome lightning stuff in real. Okay, I could have thought earlier we have not enough power here and security and all that. So, but where can we see it for real?
32:42
Oh, I'm sorry to disappoint. Yeah, sorry, I wasn't able to bring the system with me. There is a, I believe there is a coil that someone has brought along about a block over that you can see, it's pretty cool. Please come visit me in New Zealand.
33:03
And unfortunately I'm not ready to quit my day job but perhaps when I can, I'd love to be able to take some time off and bring some coils around the world a bit. At the moment there, I need to build some road cases, they're quite hard to transport. And what I've heard, there is at least one Tesla coil at the camp, so just put it on Twitter
33:21
and somebody will guide you there. Yeah. Well, thanks for the talk. Was there like some situation where it was really dangerous and you really get harmed or fire and nearly all get killed? Oh, no, actually everything has been very safe.
33:42
Yeah, nothing is. Nothing has happened. So I have actually sat in a very large coil while it runs. A friend of mine has built a very large, this one's a 50 kilowatt coil. And I go sit in the Torade when it runs right on the high voltage wire.
34:01
So I sit at about a million volts and you are down there at about, from my point of view, some strange negative voltage. So that's very strange for you, but I think I'm at zero. And it's kind of fun because you can poke objects out through the Torade and you can throw lightning bolts at people, which is fun
34:22
to make them scream and run away. But you also have to be very careful not to put any part of yourself actually through that because the field will enhance off your body and then you'll be very sad. So fortunately, friends of mine have been able to keep me pretty safe from doing things like that.
34:41
Thanks, awesome work, and keep going on. Oh, thank you very much. Thanks. Back here. Hi, thanks for the talk. My question is, can you modulate the sound by changing the composition of the air? Oh, interesting question. So something we have thought about doing,
35:05
well, apart from giving the coil something to play with as it arcs, is also feeding at different compositions. So something that's quite fun to do is run a propane flame effect system next to it and let the arc interact with the flame.
35:22
And we actually went and filmed this in high speed and we saw some interesting things. So at about 1,000 frames per second, it looks like the arc is interacting with the flame, just kind of just hitting it. But if you really slow it down and look at it, it's almost like it pushes the flame down in the place where the arc hits.
35:43
And I don't understand exactly what's going on there, but that suggests that something interesting is going on and that maybe we can feed it some different substances or different gases and cause it to change. And if we can cause it to change in that way, then we may be able to cause it to change in a musically interesting way. Very cool, thanks.
36:01
I guess we need the video on this one. Thank you. So you're bringing that next, in four years to the next camp? I think I'm detecting some kind of hint that I need to bring a coil next time. Thank you.
36:22
So we have one more question over here. Nice setup. It's a bit hard to tell from the videos how loud exactly is this? Oh. What? Did you say something? What? Yeah, it's actually horrendously loud. So the smaller demo videos that I showed you there
36:43
are kind of manageably loud, but the big coil is deafening, certainly over 100 dB. In fact, I'm not sure what my neighbors think. Like I live in a light industrial area, and when we run the big system perimeter,
37:01
like it echoes off the hills. And I swear there's just people in the neighborhood that are like, what is that? I just don't understand what goes on. So it can be very loud, but generally obviously in music mode, we try and keep that down. So while the coil is certainly capable of putting out a lot of power, it's no good if you deafen your audience
37:22
so they can't hear anymore. So how low can it do a frequency, and did someone try using it as a subwoofer? Ah, so this actually, you can go down to the lowest MIDI note. This is actually where we use it as a drum machine.
37:42
So you see I've got an example of that. I have one doing a cover of Blue Monday, doing the drum machine for that. This one, it throws out very large, fat arcs, like bang, bang, bang. Then we change the power slightly so it's more of a snap kind of drum sound.
38:01
So you can get it down that low, but bass notes are quite challenging because you can hear the points where the power is scheduled. So that's one of the first things for having multiple oscillators per note is to have many things running, each at 30 hertz or 60 hertz,
38:21
and have them all slightly offset to kind of richen up the sound. So the bass is better than I think a regular coil, but it could use some more work. Cool, thank you. Thanks. So are there any more questions?
38:40
Well, if not, I would ask you for another closing round of applause for Josh, please. Thank you.