I have always been a music lover. In my free time, I love to play guitar or piano or listen to my favorite albums. I also enjoy tinkering with electronics, so naturally I decided to do something that blends both of these hobbies.
Outside of class and school-related projects, I have been making a musical instrument that produces notes based on the position of an object in front of an infrared sensor. I designed a simple circuit using an infrared emitter and detector. The detector varies its resistance based on the amount of light it senses. I am using an Arduino to power the circuit, run programs that specify which musical notes to produce, and read a varying voltage signal. The red circuit board on top of the Arduino is a MIDI shield that was purchased online and contains a variety of instrument sounds to chose from. The shield takes input commands from the Arduino and outputs a specific musical note.
After testing the circuit on a breadboard and writing a simple program to read the incoming detector signal, I decided to put together a prototype of my instrument. I soldered four emitter/detector circuits and built a housing out of sheet aluminum. I then mounted the circuit boards and two potentiometers to control specific MIDI parameters like volume, filter amount, or instrument type.
