My Final Project

This is where I will start defining my final project idea and start to get used to the documentation process.

For my final project, I want to make a synthesizer that produces sounds that are based on the input of different sensors, which can achieve unique sounds for different physical properties of the environment.

Ideation

Digital music and sound generation is a topic that I have always wanted to explore, previously in college I had a project that used capacitive sensor to sense the electromagnetic field and use the values to produce sound, but it was just changing the frequency of the buzzer based on the signal and didn't generate sound as a synth would do, I want to look further on this direction. There are tons of projects out there for making synths but I don't want to just redo the existing projects. And for my only experimentation, I want to approach it from a more fundamental way and see if I can make something different.

So I did some research on the basics of the synthesizers and learned that, because the pitch of a sound is determined by the frequency of the sound wave, the key to creating different sounds is to make the different wave patterns in the period of the wave. Any pattern of the wave can be created by adding up fundamental waves like sine waves, so the synthesizers work by combining and manipulating sound signals coming from an oscillator with different filters and effects.

A lot of synths in the past were built with analog circuits to do the processing and transform of the signal, nowadays these works can be done by software, I think there's no point for me to build a synth functioning the traditional way. I wanted to try making a synth that maps the harmonic characteristic directly from some sensors' input instead of doing the signal transformation. The idea is to see if I can generate unique sounds from different sensors' input based on the different characteristics of the input signal.

(TODO: More materials needed)

Sketch

Below are sketches explaining my concept and final project device.

(TODO: explain)

Modeling

FreeCAD 3D Model

(TODO: document)