I still have so much to do on my project and I really wish I could continue to do this for the duration as I have found it a useful and inspiring. But mostly it’s been great to sit and reflect slightly on what I’ve been doing through documentation you clarify and question your own ideas hopefully streamlining your project into an interesting final piece. Group discussion is something I miss since graduating and now working on my own. So this has been refreshing to open me up to new ideas and questions I think even though I only left college a couple of years ago I have adopted a slightly reclusive attitude towards my work not really understanding where I fit into the context of art and or crafts?

So Far…

This is where I am at at the moment. I have attached one of the kalimba’s to a base stand with a lightweight aluminium arm coming out to hold the servo motors. The idea is that one servo will propel the striking arm backwards and forwards (changing the note) while the other servo will raise the arm away from the kalimba and then back down so it …

I wasn’t exactly sure of what motors I needed at first and I am still not sure if I wont need anything else apart from servos at the moment so I brought Adafruit industries Motor Shield Kit v1.0 it is a shield that sits on top of the Arduino board and allows you to control up to 4x DC motors 2x Stepper & 2x Servo motors. http://www.ladyada.net/make/mshield/use.html

It makes using the motors easier as it has all the necessary resistors and capacitors you need and it keeps you working at a high level so you are free to experiment quicker and easier as there is quite a lot of code available for using this shield. Also it comes with screw cable connectors allowing easier attachment and changing of motors.

The shield comes in a self assembly pack which requires you to solder it together. On the ladyada website all the instructions are very clear and easy to follow http://www.ladyada.net/make/mshield/solder.html.

This is what it looks like once its all soldered together and with all it’s pin’s protruding through the underneath located into the Arduino below.

I experimented with how I wanted the plucking arm to move bending wire into different positions and making linkages and then used them like shadow puppets till I got an idea of how the arm would need to be moved by the servos. So after that I tried to cobble together a wooden block with a couple of servo motors attached to it in roughly the right positions. I use this wire called stub wire which I love using and it’s great for maquettes because it’s malleable but yet still holds its shape well with strength on a light weight scale. 

After making a kalimba with an acoustic hole I still needed to amplify the sound being made so I was thinking about using a guitar pick up like a humbucker or something. I saw an example in Nicolas Collins book Handmade Electronic Music where he used a guitar pick up and took all the plastic off and then attached it to a little amplifier to pick up electro magnetic radiation and I thought this would work for the kalimba like it would a guitar. But after a quick test holding it up against my electric guitar I realized this wouldn’t work. In a discussion with guitarist I found out I would need a transducer pick up like the ones found in resonator (Steel) guitars. These are quite expensive so brought a little Cherub pick up microphone from ebay, this just clips into the acoustic hole of a guitar and you can plug it into your amp. 

This was my first attempt at trying to make a kalimba (thumb piano). I used a piece of flat sheet steel, and welded some nuts to it and a couple of little strips of steel to rest the prongs on then I used another strip of steel to clamp down on the prongs and create the tension they need to be able to produce a noise. For the prongs I used stainless steel rod as it has a high tensile quality rather then mild steel or other soft metals like aluminum.

After that I played around with the lengths of the prongs and as shown in this picture on the right wavy arms. The length determines the pitch but the shape slightly distorts them. I like the idea of having more natural and organic looking shape to the prongs.

After my initial experiments with making these from a single sheet of metal I wanted to see what it would sound like being on a hollow box with an acoustic hole. So I prepared some sheet metal using a guillotine to get this pattern then I measured and marked it out ready to be drilled and welded together. I used a …

Mechanical components by Stuart Dunbar.

I propose to make a piece of interactive sculpture that produces sound. The concept is to look at the free-will debate through trying to make the work produce sounds by reacting to the viewer’s presence and participation with the piece.

The name “Mechanical Components” comes from a quote from Daniel Dennet’s Elbow Room, asking the question “How do we reconcile our feeling of free will with the idea that we might be mechanical components of a mechanical universe?”

So within this piece of work I want to explore this theme in a way that will hopefully go beyond previously learned experiences and be an intuitively enjoyable and playful object. So by encouraging a certain lack of knowledge and experience, this will hopefully open up some biological principles of play. Through this in a whimsical manner an experiment of the free will debate will be offered to see whether you can create a harmonious result from the modified music boxes known as Kalimba’s or thumb pianos.

“Mechanical Components” stems from ongoing research into the topic of free will. Following on from my previous sculpture called “Bad Faith”, a theory by …