“Music is such a communal activity… but we tend to leave it in the hands of the expert.” —Linsey Pollak.

In this studio, we will develop interactive communal objects through the topic of music. Students will begin by exploring the different ways in which we can interact with music and how we as a class can create it within our own classroom community. Music will be considered a type of playful communication, and students will physically investigate sound-making techniques and materials as a scientific art.  Through the creation of unique musical instruments of their own design, students will discover what makes material into sound and sound into music.  Further they will address how to best share this joyful experience with the world through installing their work here at the school.

How do we make music, not just noise? How does a sound producing object invite the user to interact with it? How does a new user learn to make sounds or play music using this instrument?  What makes this activity communal?  Students will explore these questions through exercises in brainstorming, sketching, and prototyping. Ultimately we will use these skills and prototypes to develop new musical objects for our community at the classroom scale and the school scale.

The purpose of the daily post is to document the progress for the day. You will do this through the following post types:

Updates

In the Updates tab, each team member should post images of the work they completed over the course of the day. This includes ideas that came out of your mind - sketches, images of prototypes, renders or screenshots of digital designs, storyboards, etc. Every image must have a Title and Caption. See the example in the Gallery of this post.

Title - What is the image of? Be specific in terms of the version and content.
ex - Shade prototype 1,  Initial storyboard, 3D Model of Shade Connection.

Caption - What aspect of your design process does the image capture and how did it inform your process?  
ex - Exploring mobility of hexagons. We noticed that in order to raise the shade, many hexagons would need to become trapezoids.

Precedents

Precedent research is a fundamental part of the creative process, providing context, inspiration, and technical guidance. It is work that came out of someone else's mind. In the Precedents Tab, each team member should post precedents applicable to the current stage of design. While you need not have a new precedent every day, be sure to include them each time you make substantive technical or design changes.

You can read more about Precedents here.

Things to consider:

• Each precedent should have its own post.
• Each image should have a title and caption saying what the image is and attributing the source.
• Each precedent should have 1-2 sentences explaining how the precedent is applicable to your project.

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.

What is the prompt for this project?

Our prompt was to create a musical precedent for the front of the school that will attract people to the school. There were some challenges though. We couldn't destroy any parts of the building, the precedent can't be played at certain hours, and it has to be reasonable to make, we can't request large purchases such as $1,000 worth of some material.

How are we addressing this prompt?

Our massive recorder doesn't need to be placed in a spot in which it will destroy parts of the building, we will add a sign that lists hours at which our instrument can be played, and we didn't need large purchases, everything we needed to be purchased was under $100 combined.

Description:

Our musical precedent is a recorder, it is about 100" long and around 4.7" wide. It is made out of PVC pipe, has a 3D printed head and has holes drilled in it.  And we will have small PVC pipes that are 1.33' and 2' long with U hooks in them hammered into the ground, which will then hold our instrument. We will have an air pump in a box on the ground next to the recorder which will be used to play it.

How to play it:

You insert the head of the air pump into the mouthpiece of the recorder, you have some friends covering the holes, you pump the air and move your fingers on and off the holes as necessary to create a song.

Lessons learned from the prototype:

Making a big recorder is very challenging. Making large woodwind instruments is very hard. Designing a recorder head is no easy task. Patience is key when it comes to design.

Next steps:

The next step would be to add a 3D printed bottom. And create a piece on the pump that will fit into the recorder head so that it will make the intended sound.

Outside precedents which informed our design:

When I first searched giant recorder on images it came up with a sculpture of a giant recorder that lives on a playground in the UK. Everytime we were challenged during the process I thought of the recorder and how it was designed and tried to work on ours based off that recorder.

Lessons learned from final project:

Don't promise an incoming seventh grader that you will have made a giant recorder for outside the school. Making a 100"+ long recorder is near impossible when you're using a tiny recorder for the head. Designing takes so much revising, too much. 

The prompt was to make a musical installation to draw attention to our school. Also to have something that people could interact with. But we had some restrictions to think about like the classes that are near the entrance and we had to think about what times it could be used and how to attach it to the school without destroying anything. We need to draw people's  attention to our school by this.

My group is addressing this task by making a marble run for the entrance of the building.Our intervention is made with xylophone pieces and wood pieces to make different sounds. It is used by turning a lever to pick up the marble carry the marble up and lets the marble go and goes through the marble run back into the marble bowl at the bottom. We thought that a marble run would be a great way to draw people's attention because they look cool and they fit the requirements that we had and the restrictions.

Lessons from this prototype is that even if you have a good idea of what you want done it may not be as easy as it is in your head. For example i thought that making this installation was going to be so easy and it would be quick but I reallality it took a lot of work to plan the idea and how we wanted it to be able to have people to interact with it. It was a lot harder them I thought it was going to be. It was actually really hard to make what I was picturing. This project was a lot harder than I expected because I thought sense I knew how I wanted to build it and I had a picture of it in my head but to actually explain it and try to make it was a lot harder than it seemed to be in my head. 

Next steps we took was talking to my partner and figure out where to go from there and think what could keep us focused so we know what to do. We Ran into a lot of problems but we had to think about the restrictions everytime we changed something because the restrictions are important. Precedents that informed us was marble runs xylophones, music. We were just looking for ideas and thinking about what might be fun to use as a musical installation.So we were just thinking about marble run. we were also thinking about what kind of marble would sound best. When we needed to figure our next steps we thought that it was really important to stay on track with our partner and to always talk about what we could do to help each other or what we could do separately to help our group. Also always keep restrictions and requirements in our head was very helpful. Our next steps we should take is finding a way to put the xylophone keys on the marble run without cutting the edges of the boards because it takes to long and the saw broken so it doesn't work but i barely makes a sound when its not cut.

What is the prompt for this studio project?

The prompt is to create a musical intervention that is able to be interacted with in the walkway that is leading to the main entrance. Mr. Smail said that the possible locations for a musical instrument were anywhere along the main entrance pathway. There were some restrictions such as noise level, when to play it, how to install, and size of the instrument.

How are we addressing it?

At first we had the idea that we could make something like the musical fence at the montshire museum and hit it with rubber mallets(http://www.paulmatisse.com/the-musical-fence). Then we realized that this might be a little bit too hard so we started to think about musical rocks where you would drop a rock down a funnel and it would hit metal pipes and make noise. We had one last idea to make a row of drums that you hit with a mallet to make noise. We ended up pursuing the idea of the drums.

Our Musical Intervention...

Our musical instrument is a row of drums that when hit makes high to low noise depending on which drum you hit. You hit the drum with a rubber mallet, and this instrument will be installed along the hallway right by the gym where there are railings, and people can interact with it and create music.

Lessons learned from prototype...

A lesson that we learned from our prototypes is how durable the material was and that the final project would need to be more durable. We also learned the right lengths for a tube to make a certain noise.

Next steps...

Some next steps that we could take are to use metal cylinders to make the vibration and noise louder and better. We could also use something better than a tarp for the top of the drum.

Outside precedents that influenced us...

Some outside precedents that influenced us were The Musical Fence this influenced us because we got the idea to hit something with a mallet but the actual fence part would be too difficult. So we decided to just do a drum and hit it with a whole made mallet.

Slide Show

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1iGsrYGYi441qR6ZJ8XosyHrIbdOs0PA_wX_4DWpiln0/edit#slide=id.g589a6d283b_0_21

This project was assigned to us by our principal Mr. Smail. The assignment was to create a musical intstrument that me and my partner can attatch to the building without affecting the structural integegrity. This should not be to loud and it should have a stopping mechanism. Our group has made a reasonably quiet intsrument yet we have not figured out a stopping mechanism. Our intsrument is a long recorder that is pumped by a bellows foot organ. The long tube that goes from the pump to the mouthpeice symbolizes the blow of a person because we are not putting our mouths on it,  'tis not very sanitary. Some lessons I learned were that there is a specific placement of the holes that arre needed to be cut and the outhpeice is complicated, due to the fact we need to cut the air so it kind of whistles. Right now we have the whistling noise on our intsrument but for some reason the notes are not woking so we can't change the pitch. In the future we are gonna eork on making a recorder that plays more than one note. When we were thinking of ideas for a instument I thought of a fun way to use a instrument and it was either the idea of me stomping on somehting or hitting something and we went with hitting something

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1bQs6IWRSszbt8iH27Ms2KWpBMZVTpbjX7Edjd--_XZk/edit#slide=id.p

Written Portion

Prompt: We were assigned with a task to make musical interventions for the entrance hallway of Woodstock High School and Middle School. The point of making these musical interventions is to make people come down the hallway and enter the school while having something interactive along the way. If you go further down the hallway then you will find different musical interventions that you can interact with. The intervention has to be quiet during the day so they don't distract any classes. We also can't do a lot of damage to the hallway itself because then it could be unsafe to walk through.

How we are Addressing the Prompt: We made a long recorder made out of pvc pipe and the mouth of the recorder is connected to an air pump. You are supposed to play it by pumping the air pump and then air goes through the mouthpiece and makes sound. We made the recorder with an air pump so people wouldn't have to put their mouths on it and get germs from other people. Some lessons that we learned from the prototypes that we did is that it is really hard to make a DIY mouthpiece and putting holes in the recorder to make different noises. It was really hard to make the holes to make different noises because you have to space the holes really precise and the diameter of the holes and we couldn't really get it. Some next steps that we could make is making the final project look a little bit more professional because the way that we connected the mouthpiece to the air pump is just by duck tape and maybe we could use something else to connected it to make it look a little nicer. Another step that we could make to improve our designer is try to find out a way on how to make the holes work to make different sounds because we drilled holes into it but they don't work and it doesn't make different sounds. We made a recorder because we saw a youtube video on how to make one and it helped a lot on how to make it, how to make a mouthpiece, and where to put the holes and we got a better understanding on how to make a recorder.

PROMPT

We were tasked with the task to make a musical instrument to intruge and lore people into the school.

HOW ARER WE ADDRESSING IT

We dicided to make a giant recorderd and it would be placed next to a tree neer the path leading ito the school.

DISCRIPTION

We have a PVC pipe that is 103 inches and this isnt adding the recorder head we ordered and added a conector peice so it fit snugly in the tube, the whole langth is 108.5 inches. The recorder has a floor pump to blow are in to make noice.

HOW ITS PLAYED

To play this we use a floor pump to bump air threw it and we have holes to make different notes. 

LESSONS WE LEARNED 

Some things we learned are making things bigger with the same head dosnt work because... (we dont know)  fisics dosnt scale well

 NEXT STEP

Our next step would be to make a head that fit the size of the tube and see what were missing in the recorder and see how the air goes threw the instrument intsead of only the head.

WHAT INSPIRED US

  We wanted to make a didgeridoo but we dicided on a huge recorder because we didnt want people's mouths on the mouth peice so we added a pump to inhebit that.