For this project I really wanted to expand beyond what I knew and beyond what I thought a project normally is suppose to be. So I delved into electronics. I've always been fascinated by electronics but honestly have never really caught the bug to understanding them.

The essential idea for this project came from a book called "Song of Fire". It's a Religious/ Sci fi novel by Joesph Bentz. In the story the main character travels to a foreign land where music is the link to being with God. After a struggle with finding out how he arrived at this foreign land he comes to this place where they are able to manipulate music with their hands. There's a chamber in which people are able to enter and create music by touching and moving light beams around.

Ok I was a bit realistic with what I could do, but I still wanted to get close to my image of this chamber. I wanted to have lights interact with some kind of object that you can bend that would make music.

So, I went to the internet and bought an Arduino and some Flex Sensors.

The Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.

I combined the Arduino with Flex Sensors, so that the Arduino could translate the data that the flex sensors would spit out.

Now to get the music part of the project I had to use the great help of Drake who knew a program, cSound, where he could write a code that would use the data from the flex sensors and turn that data into music.

cSound is a sound design, music synthesis and signal processing system, providing facilities for composition and performance over a wide range of platforms.

Of course there were other programs that were needed in order to make everything work.

cSound uses PyCsoundAV to communicate with the serial port of the computer and then translates the signals from the Arduino.

PyCsound uses Python code to interface with Windows which the can interface with the serial port.

So again, Python to PyCsoundAV to cSound to Arduino to Flex sensors.

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