Floor vibrations

To further explore the possibilities that piezo transducers offer I will make a floor grid of connected piezos. They will be connected to four independent amplifier/speakers to create a 3D effect of ‘where’ the vibrations are created on the floor.

Floor covered with piezos connected to 4 speakers

Piezo transducers, also called contact microphones only pickup the vibrations of whatever they ‘touch’, but their surface is not very big and it is the smaller ones that can resonate the vibrations picked up more strongly. So I will have to either use a floor that can resonate the vibrations that occur when people dance on it, e.g. the metal floor of a shanty. Otherwise, it might pay of to span some kind of (plastic) foil across the floor, so the the surface of the piezos (the contact area) is somewhat extended.

Since I only have one amplifier at the moment (I am waiting for three more to arrive shortly) I could not do this experiment today, since the sound output had to go through one and the same amplifier (not exactly 3D indeed). So I tried something else that I could do: I hooked up one of the piezos to my FM transmitters (see also the radio soundscaping experiment). I will upload a video shortly, but it suffices to say that I could surprisingly easily broadcast the vibrations from the piezo to a radio frequency: like a dance vibrations live feed in very abstract form.

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