Monday, January 19, 2009

Interactive Ruben's tube prototype Mark II & III


Aaron and I worked on the 2nd and 3rd prototypes of our interactive Rubens Tube idea for next years First Night. Today we used a more practical solution with metal dryer conduit and a rubber glove as a membrane with the speaker disconnected from the tube. It's fascinating how responsive these are the volume of the music. It burns consistently brighter when the volume is higher which makes little sense to me -- spatial standing waves make intuitive sense but I don't understand why it generates a such a dramatic spatial DC response. One theory we had is that somehow vibration is changing the mixture ratio but it's not clear why. Our plan is to have about 100 of these floating on the lake so we started discussing the practicalities of floating them and addressing them each uniquely over various possible data lines. Our next experiment is going to use small campsite propane bottles to test duration and what happens if you don't have a pressure regulator.

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