Relay Speaker?

[Devin Black]

This was just an idea I came up with and it would freaking awesome if it worked.  Could I use something to separate the frequency's of music and get a bunch of relays and pulse them all at difference frequency's and play something from them, like a speaker?

[MK14]

This is one way (if it is NOT a fake video).

[CM800]

You could throw the audio straight into a single large one haha. After all, what's a speaker but an electromagnet moving metal.... and what's a relay, but an electromagnet moving metal.

I'd imagine to do what you want to would be easy enough, throw the audio into an FFT, then go from there, I wouldn't expect much though at all.

[Audioguru]

A relay is designed to be on and off, not to produce a little movement sometimes like in music or speech. It is simply an electromagnet that pulls slowly on a piece of heavy steel. The weight of the steel restricts high frequencies. The steel is not pulled and pushed like AC signals do.

A speaker has a lightweight coil in the gap of a magnet so that it can be pulled or pushed a little or a lot with music or speech even at high frequencies.

[Devin Black]

So i couldn't use the relay in a way where the faster the relay switches, the higher frequency and the slower it switches the lower the frequency? 

[cdev]

I think what he means is its optimized for binary operation so it can act as a switch, where its unambiguously pulled in or left out.

Also, unless the frequency is very low, its not going to be able to switch very fast compared to any loudspeaker.

On the other hand, experimenting with relays could get you lots of interesting sounds because relay solenoids can hit things, fast.

Almost any relay is likely to be able to exert its rapid motion much much faster and perhaps with much more precision than any human being.

[cdev]

It is possible you could build simple relays (better word is solenoid in this context, perhaps) with mechanical properties such that they resonated at given frequencies and when they resonated they would move much more.

Actually, if you are interested in music, you could make all sorts of interesting musical instruments using ideas like that as your starting point.


Quote from: Devin Black on Yesterday at 15:21:57

This was just an idea I came up with and it would freaking awesome if it worked.  Could I use something to separate the frequency's of music and get a bunch of relays and pulse them all at difference frequency's and play something from them, like a speaker?

[hlavac]

I think it will work for something like bass square wave somewhere between 100Hz and 1kHz, with volume rapidly decaying with frequency, and massive distortion due to the asymmetric one way driving.
Speaker? No way. But buzzer? Totally

[cdev]

Relays lend themselves well to use with percussive instruments and driving them with electronics you're not restricted to any particular human limited rate!

Example of very fast Balinese gamelan music that is played by human musicians:



There is already a long and quite interesting history to the use of electro-mechanical and electronic devices in music and I suspect the story has just barely begun.

Tape, sampling, and physical things like loops and mobius strips of tape, microphones and speakers feeding back into and out of one another have been used extensively in music..

This composer makes his own percussive instruments.. many would be easy to drive with relays.



Quote from: hlavac on Today at 12:07:04

I think it will work for something like bass square wave somewhere between 100Hz and 1kHz, with volume rapidly decaying with frequency, and massive distortion due to the asymmetric one way driving.
Speaker? No way. But buzzer? Totally