Prompt:
Mr. Smail came to the class in the beginning of the quarter with a request for us to create a musical precedent to attract be into the school. During the discussion Mr Smail brought up constraint about the building, such as no destruction to the building, no expansive requests and you can't be played during certain hours of the school day. After our class discussion we were put into groups, with our groups we brainstormed ideas then decided which musical precedent to further expand and make models.
Our Project:
Once we had drawn out our ideas for our music box we started to make a prototype of what the final product would be. First we started off with a 1/2 inch PVC pipe that had screws in to so that when it hit the xylophone. The xylophone would only be making the noise not the pipe itself. Then we realized we could make it more efficient with still using the pipe but putting springs on the pipe to make the springs vibrate when hit off of the xylophone. We discovered that this idea would be efficient and would work for our final product. With having put the missing pieces of the puzzle in we started to make our final product. After we made the box for the xylophone to sit in we started to make the crank. The crank we were using is a cast iron crank which isn't the strongest when having to put heavy amounts of weight on it at one time. When we asked Mr. Beck for assistance the handle broke so we weren't able to make the full working music box.
The way you play the music box is you turn the crank. When you turn it the springs on the inside of the box that is attached to the metal poll that hits a wooden dowel. This makes the spring vibrate before it even hits the xylophone to create a louder noise when the spring is hitting the xylophone.
Our next steps would be to finish our music box completely and have it be able to be assembled outside of the main entrance.
A lesson we learned was to have all of the materials before building the project to be fully prepared, and talk to the group members along the way.