MakeHarvard 2020 Winners: The Meloditron
The weekend of February 1-2, 2020, three friends and I formed a team and drove into Cambridge, ready to take on MakeHarvard. We decided we wanted one last chance for us to do something fun together before we graduated, and before the stress of the semester really picked up. While we took the challenge seriously, the overarching goal was never to win. We just wanted to have a good time and make a cool thing. After a long morning of brainstorming, our team finally came to the consensus that we wanted to make something musical. We were a team of three musicians and one decidedly non-musical individual, so our goal became to make a musical instrument that was so accessible that anyone could play it well.
Enter the Meloditron, a tool for creating musical loops and melodies. Our instrument uses a series of eight ultrasonic distance sensors, each of which detects the distance of a corresponding block that the user can slide back and forth along a track. The closer the block is to the sensor, the lower the note; the farther away, the higher the note. With this setup, the user can create an eight-note melody that the instrument plays on loop. Additionally, each note has a potentiometer knob that the user can turn to change the duration of the note in order to create more rhythmic melodies.
To build this instrument, we assembled a frame out of 80-20 T-slot aluminum that served both as a main structure and also as a sliding track for our blocks. We laser-cut black acrylic and heat-bent it to create our blocks, which we then attached onto our horizontal rails with sliders. The ultrasonic sensors fit into a laser-cut panel attached onto the side of the machine, and an additional side panel contained our potentiometer knobs and a 4x4 keypad input. We controlled all of our sensors and inputs off of a single Arduino Mega, which loops through each sensor, collects the distance data, and assigns that value to the nearest note in a major scale. Additionally, our code takes input for tempo and key, which we hope to be able to control with the keypad in a future version. From there, the Arduino converts the data into MIDI and sends it to the music production software Ableton Live via the HairlessMIDI extension. Ableton provides us with the ability to play the audio live on a variety of realistic-sounding instrument patches.
We were very proud to have created a product that looked professional, demoed well, and was fun and intuitive to use. At the end of the competition, we had a number of other teams come up to our table and try out our invention. That was our first clue that we had created something of value. Much to our surprise, the Meloditron won MakeHarvard's grand prize, and we happily shared the stage with a number of other successful Olin teams. I personally got a lot out of the experience; I got to experiment with new building materials, flex my digital fabrication muscles, and explore the intersection of music and engineering. I'd love to do more project work in that area, as it has the potential to combine two of my passions in exciting and compelling ways. Our whole team expressed interest in creating a version 2 of our invention, but our in-person semester ultimately got cut short. In that regard, I'm truly grateful for the opportunity we got to spend a little more time with one another in our senior year.
Check out our DevPost submission for MakeHarvard, or the article Olin College wrote about our victory.
Enter the Meloditron, a tool for creating musical loops and melodies. Our instrument uses a series of eight ultrasonic distance sensors, each of which detects the distance of a corresponding block that the user can slide back and forth along a track. The closer the block is to the sensor, the lower the note; the farther away, the higher the note. With this setup, the user can create an eight-note melody that the instrument plays on loop. Additionally, each note has a potentiometer knob that the user can turn to change the duration of the note in order to create more rhythmic melodies.
To build this instrument, we assembled a frame out of 80-20 T-slot aluminum that served both as a main structure and also as a sliding track for our blocks. We laser-cut black acrylic and heat-bent it to create our blocks, which we then attached onto our horizontal rails with sliders. The ultrasonic sensors fit into a laser-cut panel attached onto the side of the machine, and an additional side panel contained our potentiometer knobs and a 4x4 keypad input. We controlled all of our sensors and inputs off of a single Arduino Mega, which loops through each sensor, collects the distance data, and assigns that value to the nearest note in a major scale. Additionally, our code takes input for tempo and key, which we hope to be able to control with the keypad in a future version. From there, the Arduino converts the data into MIDI and sends it to the music production software Ableton Live via the HairlessMIDI extension. Ableton provides us with the ability to play the audio live on a variety of realistic-sounding instrument patches.
We were very proud to have created a product that looked professional, demoed well, and was fun and intuitive to use. At the end of the competition, we had a number of other teams come up to our table and try out our invention. That was our first clue that we had created something of value. Much to our surprise, the Meloditron won MakeHarvard's grand prize, and we happily shared the stage with a number of other successful Olin teams. I personally got a lot out of the experience; I got to experiment with new building materials, flex my digital fabrication muscles, and explore the intersection of music and engineering. I'd love to do more project work in that area, as it has the potential to combine two of my passions in exciting and compelling ways. Our whole team expressed interest in creating a version 2 of our invention, but our in-person semester ultimately got cut short. In that regard, I'm truly grateful for the opportunity we got to spend a little more time with one another in our senior year.
Check out our DevPost submission for MakeHarvard, or the article Olin College wrote about our victory.