Musical Instrument Project Blog 3/22

Flouti(t)aur

This week, we completed our musical instrument project. We needed to build a working instrument, record its sound and audacity, and make a video recording of us playing the instrument. Above is the image and link to the document holding all of our work. Our instrument is called a Floutitaur and is a hybrid between a flute and a guitar. While working on this project, we recorded our notes and audacity, which are the four images in the middle. We played different notes at different pitches and volumes, and we compared them to see how frequency, wavelength and amplitude were affected by pitch and volume. When the pitch is higher, the frequency increases and the wavelength decreases. When the pitch is lower, the frequency decreases and the wavelength increases. The amplitude increases with volume and vice versa. This was all clear while comparing the audacity images above. 

Backward-looking: What problems did you encounter while you were working on this piece? How did you solve them?

Some problems that we encountered while working on this piece were tuning our instruments. We had trouble getting the guitar to sound like we wanted it to, and the flute wasn't making very much noise at all. We solved this by placing two pencils between the rubber bands and the guitar body and rotating them to tune the strands to the proper pitch. We wrapped the flute in tape, covering the holes, and placed a piece of baking paper on the bottom to make a sound similar to that of a kazoo. With these minor fixes, we were successful. 

Inward-looking: What was especially satisfying to you about either the process or the finished product?

What was satisfying about the final product was that it actually made music. I wasn't sure that it was going to sound good, but it made noise and it was in tune, and that was very satisfying for me. I liked playing the song as well because I enjoyed playing music on the instrument that I had helped create myself.

Outward-looking: Did you do your work the way other people did theirs? In what ways did you do it differently? In what ways was your work or process similar?

Other people had different ideas for their instruments, and their building process was different. They also chose different songs for their performance, but the audacity was the same basic idea where we played the note and compared them with the other notes. Our process of building, then doing the audacity and then playing was the same, but the material we used and our priorities in the building process were different. 

Forward-looking: What would you change if you had a chance to do this piece over again?

If I had a chance to do this over again, I would build my instrument faster and get on to the audacity sooner. We spent a while building because our plan wasn't very good, and we were rushed in all of the other tasks. If I could do this again, I would make sure that we had a solid plan before we started anything.