Okay, I am in a back room at Telus World of Science where we've set up this thing.
I should say we because my friend Jesse my friend and a person who works here
and also my Dungeon Master in Dungeons & Dragons - he's helped me set up this
thing, well I've helped him set up this thing...
it is a 'musical Tesla coil' and I built an instrument just to play on it. This is
gonna be kind of a weird video but I think I'm gonna have a lot of fun. This
is our Tesla coil it's a very fancy piece of equipment there's a lot going
on but basically what we're doing is trading voltage for current. We want to
create a very high voltage at the top of the device and you can see we have many
many loops of copper wire we have some very thick wire down at the bottom in
few loops and we have very very many coils or windings of a very narrow wire
in the pedestal in the middle and then a few more windings of wire up at the top
the electrical interplay of all of this wire coiled around very tightly is going
to give us an enormous voltage up at the top which is going to send electrical
charges out of this antenna essentially creating lightning bolts and when those
lightning bolts go through the air they're going to take the electrons off
of the atoms in the air creating a plasma which is very very hot and when
air gets very hot it expands and that expansion wave is going to travel out
and when it hits our ears it's going to sound like a thunderclap. Now, by building
up lots and lots and lots of those thunderclaps in a very very precise way
thousands every second we can actually create an audible note and hopefully we
can use that to make some music.
So how does a thunderclap become a sound, or how do many thunderclaps become a
sound? Well it actually all happens in our brain if you think about a cardboard
box with corrugations on it if you run your fingernail very slowly across them
you'll hear each corrugation but if you run your finger across very fast all of
those little pop-ups they build up in our brains into an audible note they can
be a lower frequency or a higher frequency depending on how fast you run
your fingernail across the cardboard but all of the music happens in our brains
so this thing is the world's one and only binary lightning flute. I know it's
the one and only because I built it and what it does is plays notes on to this
thing that plays lightning and that makes sounds when I built this I was
intending it to be an actual flute so that you would blow in and play the
buttons but this isn't very sensitive so I'm mostly going to be playing it just
with my fingers I call it a binary lightning flute because these buttons
correspond with binary digits and that is getting translated into a number
which gets translated into a note which gets played on this a grand piano can
only play 88 notes but this foot thing plays 256 which is more than the human
can hear so I mean it's a little it's completely it's completely absurd you
actually play all these these counts you 11 now a grand piano can play multiple
notes at a time and it is way easier I think to play a piano than this because
there are 256 possible different finger combinations and they don't seem to make
any sense until you understand how the binary system works the binary system is
pretty cool basically everything is either a 0 or a 1 which is either not
being pressed down or the button is being pressed down so that's a zero
that's a 1 so we use decimal numbers day-to-day like 12 and 23 and the first
digit in that is the ones column the second digit and that is the tens and
then the hundreds column and the thousands column but in binary it's
different and each of these buttons represents a different column in the
binary system where each button has a value that is twice as much as the
preceding one
so this is a zero or one that's it so it's playing the number zero it's
playing the number one I've set it up so that the number zero is a and then
suddenly this is a sharp now this second button can either be on or off but if it
goes down and it is the twos column so this will play the number two so
suddenly it's playing a B it's playing a B so what we've got here is the number
zero when nothing's being pressed that's an A we've got an A# or a 1 when
that's being pressed when just this is being pressed that's a 2
which is B and then we've got if we add this we've got a C the number 3 and it
goes on like that so suddenly if i press this down that's a 4 that's a 5 that's a
6 that's a 7 that's an 8 that's a 9 that's a 10 that's an 11 that's a 12
that's a 13 that's a 14 that's a 15 and so on all the way up to 256 that's what
makes the binary system pretty amazing because you can come you can encode a
lot of complexity you can encode 256 different values in 8 buttons and
they're not dials a button is very simple to build you can make a button
just by pressing two wires together you don't have to make a crazy potentiometer
it's something that you can build computers out of and that's why
computers use the binary system that's where it all comes down to we used to
have to make computers with vacuum tubes that were just simple switches but we
could encode numbers and then math and the entire language of programming is
based off of that but this thing just plays musical light names because I can
okay so we just spent the last few hours setting this thing up and using it and
Jesse was really patient and listened to my horrible electric lightning flouting
it was great there's a lot of fun yeah we had a blast thank you and thanks to
all Science World for making this possible our pleasure.