Today I did a quick test and talked about my work with Milo at the Uni. 

Firstly, I tried to adjust different variables to get different sounds out of the steel plate, but so far I haven’t found anything that works except the thickness of the plate. I had previously thought that the distance between the plate and the speaker might change the sound, and that the hardness of the object hitting the plate might be a variable, so I experimented with these two things. For the first experiment, I loosened the nuts to adjust the distance between the speaker and the plate, and then manually adjusted them to listen to the sound, and for the second experiment, I wrapped several layers of paper tape around the object to make it a bit stiff and relatively soft. 

Firstly, we successfully tested the effect of the distance between the speaker and the steel plate, and found that the sound changed sensitively with distance: too far away and there was no sound at all, too close and the sound was just the sound of the speaker, not the sound of steel hitting steel. These results convinced me that I needed to fine-tune the distance between the speaker and the steel plate.

Unfortunately, it didn’t help to put a few layers of paper tape on the object to try to hit the steel. I concluded that the power given is small and the movement of the speaker plates is not very large, so it would be difficult to use it for hard materials that require a lot of force and vibration. 

I went to school, and today I talked to Milo about my work, which turned out to be quite an important tutorial. Firstly, I mentioned my concern that the sound was too monotonous because I couldn’t adjust the pitch, and that the steel plate was bolted down so it didn’t resonate much. MIlo suggested that for resonance, it would be good to have a resonance plate that is connected to the plate and resonates instead, or alternatively, to put a small spring between the bolts that hold the plate. As for the fixed pitch, he said that it could be varied by adjusting the length of the steel plate, like a glockenspiel. 

However, when I showed him a video of my experiments with two speakers, he was intrigued and said that it was possible to get a fresh sound from their combination without necessarily changing the sound itself. There are different things you can do with one speaker, different things you can do with two speakers, and different things you can do with multiple speakers, so it’s something to keep in mind for future sequences.