How do you tune a staircase?

[Ferdinand]

From me on the other thread:

 

Quote

From my youth I recall a house in St Ives (the flat one near Cambridge with the new Guided Busway, and cheapskate cycletrack alongside that has parts below winter floods) with an open well open tread staircase built on a spiral of metal, and how it used to go bung-bung-bung like a single string base guitar as the 10 year old Ferdinand bounced up or down each step. Cool.

 

Do you suppose a staircase can be tuned to play Doh-Re-Mi as you climb it? How would you build it - an ever decreasing spiral?

 

So how would you do it?

 

I am thinking metal or thinnish wooden treads quite isolated from each other, and tuned to resonate at each frequency in the musical scale.

 

[Onoff]

Pressure pads and a simple organ circuit!

[Ferdinand]

1 hour ago, Onoff said:

Pressure pads and a simple organ circuit!

 

That is cheating.

[SteamyTea]

But much easier and you can add in different instruments.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/88-Keys-USB-Flexible-Roll-up-Roll-up-Electronic-Piano-Keyboard-SE/122300383285

[Bitpipe]

We bought one of these for the kids. http://www.makeymakey.com/

 

Using Scratch (a child friendly coding environment) we made a banana piano. should be easy enough to rig to the stair

 

 

[jfb]

I think you might struggle to get a full scale or else your treads will have to change a lot from top to bottom.

Maybe concentrate on a closer scale with quarter tones!

The treads wouldn't have to be completely isolated to get different pitches I reckon.

 

I once tuned some 10 foot tables to get different pitches by making the tops a few mm different (though a little hard to hear the pitch difference in the video but it is there)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM2G-MZMvrU

 

 

[Ferdinand]

Quarter tones could work in an Indian Restaurant.

 

Hmm. Tune by altering the depth of the tread? Or making them as a metal box?

 

Or tune by using metal stair rods which can be tensioned or adjusted?

 

Or banisters made out of pipes, which would need to be varied by diameter not length.

 

 

F

Edited July 11, 2017 by Ferdinand

[ToughButterCup]

Well, @Ferdinand, I'm not going to bother to tune ours. I remember too well the noise my heels made as I tripped, and then slipped down a shiney polished staircase. And I bit my tongue hard at the same time. Luckily I was young when that happened. Eyes water at the memory 

[MikeSharp01]

You are effectively wanting to build a set of chime bars or perhas a xylophone might be better to mechanically amplify a tiny amount of movement as you step on the stair to drive a small hammer that hits the tuned bar. And don't forget the tuned resonant cavity below it will you.

[Onoff]

Got to be a contender for this month's best thread title?

[SteamyTea]

9 hours ago, MikeSharp01 said:

xylophone

One like this

[Ferdinand]

Quite like the idea of banisters as a giant glockenspiel or tubular bells.

 

Will now leave this alone until And unless I decide to build one.

 

Like the idea of a tunable one playing God Save the Queen:-), then the Marseillese the next week.

Edited July 12, 2017 by Ferdinand

[MikeSharp01]

12 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

One like this

No one like this, that was a stylophone IIRC, and we won't even say what the bloke in the image was:

 

Image ref : https://musicrhapsody.com/product/12-key-handcrafted-xylophone/

 

[SteamyTea]

While wandering around the back streets of Penzance today, I found a glockenspiel for sale.

Transparently you trim the ends to make the note sharp, and hollow out the back to soften the sound.