F - week 2 sem 2 - piezo buzzer

This week was all about the piezo speaker/buzzer being a lovely contact mic. Oh also about soldering.[1]

I tried various techniques with the then 'contact mic'.

I tried attaching to a large sheet of glass/tabletop which I just happened to have lying about, the idea was to see what sort of ambience it would then pick up - not very much was the answer, I think the glass is just too thick.

Attached it to a cardboard box, this was kind of cool, the flaps flapping made kind of nice wobbly noises.

Then attached to the bottom of a tin can, wacked a rubber band around and started playing. You could almost make an instrument out of this :) This was where I noticed at some frequencies the mic vibrated physically against the tin - this may have been a good noise, but I was after purity of rubber band so I got annoyed :(

Then tried it as a contact on accoustic guitar, really noticed it's lack of bottom end, also again it buzzing against the body. This could be rectified by a different mode of attachment rather than the straight taping it to the object I did do.


And ooops, where are all my audio files? No idea :) I'll just have to do them again.



[2] “Music Technology Forum – Week 02 – Input and Output". University of Adelaide, Engineering North, Electronics Lab. 02 August 2007.