Crazy Instruments Installment 1

So I have seen my share of crazy looking instruments from a Fiddle-dee-doo to a Gravikord, but today I'm going to tell you about something that most people wouldn't think of as an instrument at all. The Tesla Coil.

For those of you who aren't familiar with what a tesla coil is, it is basically a transformer. In the simplest terms it takes electrical energy and transmits it from one coil to another resulting in a changing current which in this case creates really high voltage, low current, and high frequency electricity. The deal with Tesla coils is although they are sometimes used as igniters after modification they are basically used for entertainment. What's entertaining? How about the massive amount of electric discharge that results in lightning-like streaks from the coil's top? Frequencies given off by these coils have also been harnessed to create music of a sort and thus these crazy coils have jumped the gap into the instrument realm.

The coils, while already giving off sound, have been found to work better for the musical pursuit if the coils are vacuum-tube tesla coils, also referred to as SSTC or Solid State Tesla Coils. The reason for this is because the tesla coil's output is much more controllable with these kinds of coils. Even crazier is the modification that they do on the SSTCs themselves.

For example, one can change the Amplitude Modulation (referred to as AM). If one changes the amplitude so that there is a constant output of the plasma flame (the lightning-type discharge mentioned earlier) then the volume of the sound produced by the tesla coils become much more controllable.

The other main modification has to do with the pulse repitition frequency. Simply put: a tesla coil will have a set amount of times that is produces sparks (again the lightning discharge) per second. By changing the frequency at which this happens they can alter the frequency to match that of a musical note that they want played. Thus they have notes and volume! Crazy!

As an example, please enjoy the coils in action:

These specific coils, built by Steve Ward and Jeff Larson, are 7 feet tall, 18 feet apart, and controlled by a laptop which has assigned each coil one midi channel.

Very Punny

What do you mean you can't tuna fish? Just adjust its scales.