Home | Concept | Body & instrument | Optical tonearm | Turntable platter | PIC code | Review
The principal body of the device is taken from a Technics SLQ350 turntable, with an expanded body to house the additional electronics. It communicates with the computer via USB using the Human Input Device and Force Feedback joystick protocols, according to embedded hardware code running on a MicroChip PIC based circuit embedded within the turntable.
Drawing inspiration from Kitundu's Phonoharp (http://www.cpcarts.org/kitundu/main.html), a guitar string is suspended in tension across the turntable body, using a wooden frame. The turntable's original tonearm arm serves as a freely movable ‘bottle-neck' by contacting between the string and wooden frame. The stylus meanwhile picks up the vibration of the string through the tonearm body, to be amplified and routed to the computer for processing. Five dditional strings are mounted to the wooden frame as fixed tuning sources, whose vibrations are collected by a piezo contact mic mounted in the frame.
