What was Our Prompt

We were told to make a musical installation that could be incorporated into the school entrance and would draw people in. It had to be durable, easily accessible, and  not an annoyance to ongoing classes. 

How Did We Address This

After looking at a few ideas and prototypes, we decided on music box idea that would be played by a bicycle. We had a few idea on how this would work and eventually we came to the conclusion that we would attach a pole going through the box to one of the wheels so when someone peddled the bike it would spin the pipe which had springs with balls on the end which would hit a xylophone inside the box. 

The Process

As we went along building this we realized towards the end that we did not have enough time to make the box be played by a bike. Instead we just tried to add a crank but sadly the crank broke while we were attaching it, and our springs that we ordered to put on the pipe never arrived until class was over.

What We Learned

Something's we learned are how time is one of your biggest constraints. that certain materials have different strengths, and that not every one works at the same pace as you

Prompt:

Mr. Smail came to the class in the beginning of the quarter with a request for us to create a musical precedent to attract be into the school. During the discussion Mr Smail brought up constraint about the building, such as no destruction to the building, no expansive requests and you can't be played during certain hours of the school day.  After our class discussion we were put into groups, with our groups we brainstormed ideas then decided which musical precedent to further expand and make models. 

Our Project:

Once we had drawn out our ideas for our music box we started to make a prototype of what the final product would be. First we started off with a 1/2 inch PVC pipe that had screws in to so that when it hit the xylophone. The xylophone would only be making the noise not the pipe itself. Then we realized we could make it more efficient with still using the pipe but putting springs on the pipe to make the springs vibrate when hit off of the xylophone. We discovered that this idea would be efficient and would work for our final product. With having put the missing pieces of the puzzle in we started to make our final product.  After we made the box for the xylophone to sit in we started to make the crank.   The crank we were using is a cast iron crank which isn't the strongest  when having to put heavy amounts of weight on it at one time. When we asked Mr. Beck for assistance the handle broke so we weren't able to make the full working music box. 

The way you play the music box is you turn the crank. When you turn it the springs on the inside of the box that is attached to the metal poll that  hits a wooden dowel. This makes the spring vibrate before it even hits the xylophone to create a louder noise when the spring is hitting the xylophone.

Our next steps would be to finish our music box completely and have it be able to be assembled outside of the main entrance. 

A lesson we learned  was to have all of the materials before building the project to be fully prepared, and talk to the group members along the way.