Midi Madness: Tesla Coils and Mario Bros United in Sound and Light

What happens when you put the Mario Bros. theme music together with a Tesla Coil? If your answer was awesome electrical magic for your eyes and ears, you’d be right. If your answer was “Why would I even dream that up and why do I care?” then you can skip on ahead and go on living in your dull, boring world of darkness and silence.

Two wild and crazy guys, Steve Ward and Jeff Larson, had the brilliant idea to marry two amazing innovations of humanity: Mario Bros. and Tesla Coils. This Twin Solid State Musical Tesla coils serenade was presented at the 2007 Lightning on the Lawn Teslathon in Baraboo WI back in October.

The music that you hear is coming from the sparks that these two identical high power solid state Tesla coils are generating. There are no speakers involved. The Tesla coils stand 7 feet tall and are each capable of putting out over 12 foot of spark. They are spaced about 18 feet apart. The coils are controlled over a fiber optic link by a single laptop computer. Each coil is assigned to a midi channel which it responds to by playing notes that are programmed into the computer software.

Watch and learn, people. Watch and learn.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1O2jcfOylU[/youtube]

[via Geekologie]

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 8:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.