[Drone] tipped us off about [Joachim]‘s efforts to alter a crystal’s frequency. Through a process called penning, a crystal’s resonant frequency is lowered by painting the crystal with an indelible ink marker. Our curiosity piqued, we went off  and found more information about penning crystals. It turns out this technique has been around for nearly [...]

This is an interesting take on a music box. [Blair Neal] is using an overhead projector with a roll of transparency to make a synthesized music box. A camera watches the projected image and feeds data to Max/MSP to produce the sounds. Customization merely requires creative image analysis. In this case, different colored pens or [...]