Testing the Waters

On the first day of conceptual development I came up with the idea that we could use water as a conductive method to interact with a set of keyboard hacks, the idea originally came from my research where I discovered a sound installation where a fungi dropped spores through a laser which caused a sound to play. I thought that we could use the same feature, but instead of spores we could use droplets of water that hit keyboard hacks to cause conductivity and sounds to occur. Together our group sifted slowly through ideas and eventually we came up with a plan to design a  system of keyboard hacks placed down different tubes. Water would flow down and trigger keyboard hacks which would feed into ableton live.

After some experimentation and prototyping to eliminate the hurdles we thought we would face we discovered that water itself from the tap was not conductive. This however did not set  us back, after a quick Google we discovered that impurities in water were what gave it its conductive property. Thus, we added salt to the water. After running it through our prototype (a 1m long pipe with 1 keyboard hack) we were successful. But we also encountered another problem.  And that was the fact that if the wires were too close then the water would get caught on the wires and it would keep printing out the same key over and over. Because of this, we knew we would have to be extremely careful on how we placed the wires down the pipe. They would have to be spaced out enough to conduct for a short  period of time but not too close to create a build up on water.