Turning barcode scanners into synths and cathode ray TVs into guitars. 🎸 engineering
in truly inspiring ways."Electromagnetic musical instruments", as the artist calls them, include barcode reader synths, fan basses, cathode ray tube guitars, and drums — respectively named barcoder, factory fan bass, and CRTelecaster.
Perhaps the most curious"instrument" among them is the barcoder. Typically, handheld barcode readers have a coil inside them that moves a tiny mirror. Which means the laser diode's position constantly changes. This is the reason why we hear that iconic"beep" sound when an item is scanned at the market. As the barcodes scanned in our daily lives are rather small and tightly spaced, the beeping we hear is a rather high-pitched one. You can hear how that compares in the video below when the artist"The artist utilizes barcodes with a wide range of thickness and spacing between them. Thus he can get different pitches to his liking.
If we were to move the barcoder away from a set of lines the pitch would go higher as the barcoder sees smaller lines with less spacing in between. Although, this comes with its own tradeoff — while the focus is not an issue with laser scanners, ambient light is.The further we move the barcoder away from the scanned lines, the more ambient light we capture, and thus, the more noise we have in our hands.
You see, we likely don't actually"hear" the noise we're talking about here. The information we pick up from the scanner is processed before being reproduced for our hearing.
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