Remember Tesla coils? You’ve probably seen them at a science museum or on TV. You probably haven’t asked yourself whether or not they could be used to make music.
Apparently, some folks have asked this question. You can search “tesla coil music” on YouTube and find a bunch. In the video above, are a pair of enormous Tesla Coils harmonizing (yes, serioiusly) to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” courtesy of a young engineer named Eric Goodchild, whose father my wife knows. If this isn’t crazy enough you can watch his buddy getting zapped by these musical transformers in a chain mail suit they refer to as the “spark suit.”
If you’re curious about how one might go about playing the musical Tesla coils (say, with an iron guitar or an Xbox Kinect), head on over to my post on The Composers’ Playground.
What follows is taken from the description on the YouTube video page:
These are two gigantic solid state musical Tesla Coils. A Tesla Coil is a special type of transformer invented by Nikola Tesla that is able to generating extremely large voltages using a phenomenon known as electrical resonance. Each coil in this video is capable of generating a 13 foot spark. This equates to about 500,000 volts of electricity.
The primary drive system for the coils consists of high power semiconductors arranged into an H-Bridge switching configuration. During a spark event, the coil is pulsed on for a few hundred millionths of a second. During this short time, thousands of amps circulate within the primary tank circuit and the energy is coupled into the secondary resonator through magnetism.
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These coils were constructed by Eric Goodchild and Steven Caton.
Eric Goodchild is currently an EE student at ASU Polytechnic.
His personal website is: http://www.goodchildengineering.net/
Steven Caton is currently an EE student at UCLA
His personal website is: http://stevencaton.com/