(W4) NOISEMAKER (project 1)
For this project, my initial idea was to portray a sense of anxiety or danger from getting close to another person. I came up with this idea while thinking about COVID and social distancing, but I also think that getting closer to a stranger or someone whose intentions you don’t know could also be anxiety-inducing or distressing. The noise here is a tone that changes frequency as a person’s hand gets closer, which would reflect that sense of wrongness being due to their proximity. I wanted to add a “shadow” element to the noisemaker that would suggest the presence of another person while also remaining ambiguous and uncertain, so I decided to also use lights in addition to having a noise that would act like an alarm.
I had three parts to incorporate: the ultrasonic sensor, the passive buzzer, and the LED lights. Once I got the ultrasonic sensor working to some degree, I experimented with how I could use the input it provided to affect both the buzzer and the LED light. I originally imagined using the distance picked up by the ultrasonic sensor to affect the buzzer’s volume, but I instead had it affect the frequency of the tone that it plays (once it gets close enough). The closer someone’s hand gets, the higher the frequency of the tone (which I think is a more disruptive noise than a lower frequency). With the LED lights, I tried to have the distance affect its brightness, which worked to an extent, but I wasn’t sure how noticeable I could make it. I then tried having distance affect the speed of the light blinking, but that also didn’t work so well. Then, I just decided to have it switch from a blue light to a red light, once a hand was close enough, to signal a switch from calm to alarming. For the human shape, I first tried making a box with a silhouette cut out where the LED would shine through as that shape. That didn’t work out so I basically reversed it and had the LED cast light to create a shadow around a paper cut out that would just be in front of the lights, which created a distorted silhouette on a wall.
