Documentation and Process - Project 2

This project honestly came together in a blur -- one of the tightest deadlines I've ever had to deal with, but I think I made an interesting and worthwhile iteration to my previous project. Due to the small amount of working time, though, there wasn't much process or conceptualizing that happened with this one, so I apologize.

I got the idea of having many crystals thanks to classmates at the last critique, but in my conception, they would be created to express different representations of energy, and different ways of interacting to infuse human energy into the object. For this project, I decided to use a light sensor and make a theremin-like crystal that would emit spacy sounds when a person covered parts of the crystal by hovering their hands over it or actively touching. The light sensor actually threw people for a loop, as they couldn't figure out how the crystal was made into a sensor, which made me happy. I was also able to get rid of the cords, which made the crystal more of a standalone, mystically-charged, object, in my opinion. I was happy people got to touch the crystal without gloves, whose surface I worked on forever, since it really does have an alluring satiny texture to it.

The electronics part was very simple, having just  a photoresistor, and piezo. The code was a bit harder to figure out, but with some help from other arduino projects trying to emulate a theremin online, I was able to figure it out. The crystal and base were the same as from my last project due to time constraints.

Here is a photo of it in action during critique :)

And here is a video, where you can hear some of the sound, it got pretty loud:

The tones were low, continuous, and calming when touching the crystal all over, and high pitched and more sporadic, like the crystal was sending out a radar signal, if hands were just hovering nearby.

Some ideas brought up in critique were:

- Feels oddly relaxing and therapeutic to play with

- A cave or room full of crystals that interact with you, make it overwhelming

- Feels like a kit that people could assemble and have their own pet crystal -- I took this to mean that it feels like a domestic object that could bring people some happiness, which is the goal, and makes me feel good :)

- The case needs to be more sturdily constructed if inviting people to touch it, would hate for it to break -- that's not relaxing. Wood was not a problem for people aesthetically though.