Table Music

This is a fusion of several previously separate ideas: [doctorremulac3]'s Lissajous Pattern Record Grooves, Record Runner, turtle robots and specifically Pen-Dragon, Panapic, and optical sound storage [links].

The player is a small mobile robot that can drive around omnidirectionally* on a flat surface. Music comes in the form of sheets of paper or plastic film, up to table-size, as well as pages in books. On these sheets and pages is printed a multicolored, high-resolution pattern that encodes analog music.

There are actually two kinds of robot that can be used in this system: electronic and mechanical.

The electronic kind looks at the pattern underneath it with a camera, and can follow the grid lines of the pattern using machine vision to play predefined tracks on the sheet by decoding the colors and brightnesses that pass under the center of its field of vision into sound. Certain markings, perhaps marks printed with a specific color of ink or perhaps spaces around/between marks, encode movement instructions so that tracks can be bent. The robot can also be programmed to follow other arbitrary paths with precision (still using the same vision system), and play the sounds it passes over.

The mechanical kind has only a single-point color/brightness sensor (which, along with its sound output, motor, and edge-of-sheet-detection system, is still electronic), and is guided around the sheet by some kind of hand-configurable mechanical motion sequencer, double pendulum, harmonograph, or other complex motion generation mechanism that can have its behavior varied from one run to the next. This causes it to play parts of the music out of sequence and in different directions, which is expected to be somewhat interesting to some people. Without a vision system, it will drift on and off of tracks, producing interesting sounds. The mechanical programming (or at least variable adjustment) makes this kind of robot's operation more tactile and also more interesting to watch, with the mechanism exposed.

*This is a departure from the turtle inspiration. Turtles usually move forward or turn to another direction in preparation to move forward. But I thought omnidirectional movement with no need to turn would work better here.

N/A [2019-10-01]