This blog is co-created by Alina (Hanlin) Liu and Martin (Xiaotian) Zhang
Description
Wavy wave is an instrument installation that I worked on with my partner in the NIME Class. We are inspired by the ocean and wanted to recreate the feeling of nature and its unpredictability through ambient music and deforms in shape.
The fabric came to our mind when we think about waves. In the plan, we can take advantage of its deformability and tension, which would be triggered by pushing objects toward the fabric.
Process
01 Ideation
We started by sketching and imagining the whole installation, giving it rough dimensions that we would eventually model and test using a laser cutter and CAD software.
02 Material Choices
We decided to use frosted acrylic as the inner material to be pushed back and forth. We love its somewhat paradoxical nature of complexity and simplicity: The transparency introduces more instability, yet its simple geometry shape prevents the instrument from being overly complex. We drew a few patterns and picked our favorite, which has a clear indication of the function of each acrylic sheet.
03 Mechanism & Structure
The interior structure is first tested with cardboard, then with laser cutter gears and pinion from acrylic sheets. Most of the supports, including the base, are made out of plywood, which we fabricated in the shop. The joints are designed in Solidworks to hold acrylic sheets, potentiometers, racks, and pinions in place. We 3D printed them at home.
We attached each potentiometer to a gear, which is connected to a rack. Therefore, we are able to convert the horizontal shift of acrylic sheets to a circular motion of the potentiometer shaft, which would be feeding data into Ableton through MIDI. It’s also worth noting that the pinion and racks are designed to be modular, meaning that although the acrylic sheets have different sizes, we would only have to make 6 same copies of the structure.
04 First Iteration
Here’s the first finished edition of the instrument, where you can see the acrylic sheets pushing the fabric, giving it extremely interesting organic shapes. We are very satisfied with the progress, although there’s a lot to be improved.
05 Second Iteration
In the second edition, we got feedback from our classmates, and we switched to a much more transparent fabric to show off the interior which everybody said they loved haha. What’s more, we decided to add visual effects to emphasize the movement of acrylic sheets through TouchDesigner.
TouchedDesigner works in progress.
