Hi chaps I've got a deaf friend who is into tina turner and stuff like that, which is not acceptable I have played him some of my CDs like the chemical brothers, aphex twin, cypress hill etc and he likes them. Turned up really loud of course Like most of us he can feel the really low frequencies He is also blind but his sense of touch is literally amazing. Has anyone got any ideas how to translate voices, small drums or even instruments (probably too much to hope for, that one) into something that you can feel? I was thinking along the lines of something that could follow a certain range or similar sound, then use it to control something that actually moves. I was thinking about the analogue dials you used to get on radios and amps, but giving them a much much shorter range of movement, and a way to be able to get them to still move with resistance to touch Also something that could tap out a beat on his fingers. Especially if it had an analogue (or as close to) output. Also would be good for it to only output certain frequncies long shot, but.... any ideas?
Umm speakers do this, why not see how well standard speakers work if he puts his fingers on the cone itself. If it works well then you could either just take the grills off a set of speakers or take the cone off too but leave the dust cap, less mass and less air to move should improve the range that the speaker can use and might make things better. Moriquendi
Spot on mate But this doesn't work so well with tweeters. I want to be able to amplify the movement a mid or tweeter has, which is susprisingly weak
How much movement are we talking about here? because i would expect a cone-less speaker to move much more and also have much better high frequency response. Tweeters dont move much at all because of the frequencies they're designed to work at, i dont know how you might get round that one. Possibly a motor whose speed is controlled by the audio signal. Moriquendi Edit, I just had a brainwave/brainfart, if you look on youtube you'll see people modding dead hard disks to produce sound using the head actuator. Head actuators have to move damn fast but also move a fair distance, it may be that one of them could keep up with the high frequencies, best of all theyre basically just a coil like a speaker is so you *might* be able to hook one straight up to an amp (i dont know what the impedance of the coil is though, might fry something unless you're careful)
My friend has a standard cab truck and has a 14" woofer behind each of the seats and you can really feel the beat
Was not Beethoven Deaf? He would rest his forehead on the top of his piano and write. So you've got correct responses to some point.... A transducer is best at converting bass to "Feel" it's basically a voice coil sans driver cone. You can take an old speaker - cut off the basket / cone - ease off the dust cap replace with a cork coaster and bolt it to a box.... shake shake shake! Just feel 'tho no real audio output. Now then the "whole spectrum" needs addressed 'tho And with the Freq of the high end not being "felt" but heard then we need to build some enclosure that can combine hi Freq's with the mid/bass. Id's offer some style of music box enclosure (have you ever listened to a music works without a box? no sound hardly at all...) Point being these little boxes have a specific size/volume to reproduce (musically) high end freq's. So a small "music" box with a dome tweeter (not a piazo <sp>) or some sort of silk dome etc... and a small transducer for the mid/low - a simple x-over and plug and play.... Good luck with this it's sounding like a worthwhile mod.
There is definitely a way to halve or even divide the frequencies in 3. You could split each stereo channel in two, and into a 4 channel amp or two 2 channel amps, so you'd have 4 speakers for feeling stereo sound. So that one speaker can be handling the amplified unaltered sound, so only the lower end of the sound spectrum can be felt in this speaker, and the other half can be fed into this "frequency halving circuit" and then into the other channel of the amp, so sound can be felt at double or triple the frequencies. The full spectrum still isn't gonna felt, if we divided too much the sound/vibrations would be muddled too much into each other, but doubling or tripling the music that can be felt would be a significant improovement i think. I don't know how to make this circuit, not without some reasearch, but maybe someone here does? I don't know what the best method of feeling the vibrations is, but i'm thinking having the speakers mounted directly to thin wood, so that the cones are hitting the wood, and the sound can be felt with the users fingers. I'm thinking that it would be good to maybe have the undivided speakers attached under a chair to vibrate the seat, and the higher frequency/split sound speakers just attached to thin wood, and mounted on the arms of the chair to be felt through the fingers.
Maybe Tina Turner feels better than Cypress Hill. He can't actually hear what he's listening to, so to each his own. Let him have his Tina!
Hey sorry for the really short first post. The first thing I thought of was making something like the music playing toothbrushes. But biting an ipod all day wouldn't be fun... hmm I'll think some more on this.
