Bicycaleidoscope

Bicycaleidoscope: A Giant Musical Kaleidoscope

Drawings

Early sketch of a musical kaleidoscope:

This sketch came from the brainstorming assignment for class -- the initial idea is a small, handheld kaleidoscope where the music syncs up with the visualization.

Design sketch of a larger, more public musical kaleidoscope experience:

Design discussions with Sasha led to the idea of using bike wheels and a spotlight to project a kaleidoscope onto a wall, with Hall sensors to track the velocity and acceleration. This sketch shows a series of bike wheels mounted on a rod. The idea is that the musician would spin the bike wheels by hand to control both the musical output and the visual results.

Starting to build the instrument:

We procured bike wheels from the bike store and a metal rod from the garage and started to set up the instrument. We experimented with using the bike frames (in the background) as part of the mounting system. The mirrors (also in the background) will form the tunnel of the kaleidoscope. Our experimentation with the wheels and the mirrors proved that the mirror tunnel is key to the visual effect of the kaleidoscope -- otherwise, only having spinning gels and beads feels a little lame.

Sketch for mounting the sensors

Now that the bike wheels are mounted, we started to think about how to incorporate sensors into the instrument. This idea is to mount the Hall effect sensors on the rod itself (stationary), to track the bike wheel movement. Then, the mirror will cover only the bottom half of the bike wheel, so that the sensor does not interfere with the visual effect.