Mozart's Right Hand
Introduction
The Project
Mozart's Right Hand is a musical instrument capable of playing two full octaves of the Diatonic Scale. The user wears a glove on his or her right hand and uses motions of the hand and fingers to create different notes. The pitch of the tone is controlled by the orientation of the user's hand. The LCD on the front of the box tells the user the pitch that corresponds to his or her current hand orientation. When the user touches together his thumb and index finger, the speaker plays the tone. A video of Mozart's Right Hand in action is available on YouTube.
The Team
- Colleen Fryer ( colleenfryer2008 at u dot northwestern dot edu ), Mechanical Engineering Graduate Student
- Sean Wood ( seanwood2010 at u dot northwestern dot edu ), Mechanical Engineering Junior
- Mat Kotowsky (kotowsky at northwestern dot edu), Civil Engineering Graduate Student
Theory of Operation
Mozart's right hand plays all of the notes, including sharps and flats, between and including C5 and C7 (where C4 is "Middle C"). Each of these notes has a specific frequency associate with it; for example: C6 has a frequency of 1046.50 Hz. Other notes' frequencies are available at http://www.phy.mtu.edu/~suits/notefreqs.html. If signal whose voltage is a 1046.50 Hz sine wave is passed through a speaker, the speaker will play C6. Increasing the frequency will raise the pitch, decreasing it will lower the pitch. Increasing the amplitude will cause the volume of the note to go up, decreasing it will cause the volume to go down.