Prompt: The prompt for this quarter's IDEA class was to create a musical intervention. The musical invention would be placed in the front walkway to draw people up the walkway and into the building. It would represent our school as innovative and interesting to visitors and passersby. Our group chose to address this prompt by making a ceiling xylophone that would be operated by pulling down cranks to hit certain notes. The reason for the notes on the ceiling was to keep the pipes out of dangers way such as weather or people. In the rest of this post I will go into deeper detail of the project.

Precedents: Our final product closely resembles the Cornell Chimes. The hitting system is very similar to this wonderfully simple music machine. A link to the Cornell Chimes is here .

Description of Final Project/Intervention: The intervention is a ceiling xylophone. The xylophone included many things that make it stand out from any other xylophone such as a crank system and a resetting hitter system. The cranks are placed six inches apart so they are far enough that two people can play them but not far enough that one person cannot play two. The self resetting system is a rubber band attracted to the hitter  so after the hitter hits the ceiling it is pulled back down to it's original position. The rubber band is made out of a flexible rubber that our coach, Max Vanatta, bought us.

Challenges: One of the challenges that came on later on in our project is the hammer length. As our project moved on we realized that we might need a different hammer length for each key but than Will came up with a brilliant idea. We had to measure the middle of the longest pipe and then we could center all the other pipes around the longest one.

How to play our Final Project: The way to play the ceiling xylophone is simple, just pull the correct lever for the desired note and the hitter will hit the correct note.

Next Steps: After all this explanation, my group has not finished our project. We still need to hang the pipes on the ceiling and drills holes into the brick wall to attract the hitting mechanism to the wall. We also need to attract the bungee cords to the hitting mechanism so everything can reset. And finally, we need to test and make sure everything works and then we will finally be finished.

Link for Video for the 4: https://youtu.be/p7jEMdKbnAU