Midterm - Ghost Choir

By Jane Cheng and Sam De Armas

When Jane and I first met we decided that although we wanted to do a halloween themed project, we liked the idea of a kid friendly experience. Jane showed me the video below and thought it would be entertaining to have a physical version of the ghosts.

Below is a sketch of the initial idea. We will have three ghost on a stage and using force sensing resistors, when a microphone is placed in front of a ghost it would start singing its portion of the song.

Image: Sketch of the initial idea. Top left is a drawing of three ghosts on a stage and three microphones, one in front of a ghost. Top right is a drawing of the ghost and how it will be made using a wire frame. Bottom left is a drawing of a microphone and tombstone which would be used to activate the ghost. Bottom right is a drawing of the box top view and inside view showing how we will hide the internal components of the piece.

To play the audio we decided to use a laptop instead of a separate speaker. We used Arduino to p5.serialcontrol to the p5js editor.

During assembly we realized the microphones were not heavy enough to activate the sensors. To counteract this we placed magnets on the bottom of the microphones and under the sensors.

To have the ghost always stay in sync the ghost would always be singing but the volume would be turned down and when a microphone is placed in front of a ghost the sensor would raise the volume of the singing.