The Sound Garden project in which we explored the physics behind sound and how sounds waves work. After coming to an understanding of the different kinds of ways and how sounds can be manipulated we created sound installations. These installations were made by groups of four to five students and are placed in and outside of our school. Creating these instruments not only improved our mindfulness, we hope that they will have the same effect on the people who discover them on our campus.
My group agreed to create an Aeolian Harp, a string instrument type of installation.
My group agreed to create an Aeolian Harp, a string instrument type of installation.
This project was the first time I truly had to familiarize myself with power tools. The harp required holes to be drilled into it in order to have the strings run along the hollow box and of the box to remain stable. As you can see from the images, I drilled into the wooden box and put in some screws, I also had to take some measurements in order to make sure I was going to drill into the correct places.
Before we could create our installations we had to select large rocks and learn to, believe it or not, create beautiful sounds out of them. Creating a stone instrument was fascinating, we had to begin by understanding what nodes were (a point in which the amplitude of a vibration in a standing wave is at zero) and how we would find them on the flat surfaces of rocks. This process consisted of us crushing up chalk into a sand like material, spreading it all over the rock, and hitting the rock consistently with a piece of wood. What this does is eventually the chalk (blue grain in the image) moves and concentrates into a certain area of the rock. These small areas are called nodes. After finding the nodes we drew out where they were on the rock and placed stands under those areas. When we would hit any other point of the rock it would create different and beautiful pitches.