How Does Tesla Coil Music Work

The high-frequency signal acts in effect as a carrier wave.

How does tesla coil music work. Conventional speakers vibrate a membrane and Tesla coils use the expansion and contraction of air due to heating from plasma. Certain types of Tesla coils like the one used here are putting out hundreds of sparks per second with a rest between each spark. Its pitch is determined by the frequency of the wave.

The singing Tesla coil sometimes called a zeusaphone thoramin or musical lightning is a form of plasma speaker. With these coils getting the frequency and length information is relatively simple from a MIDI audio source via a suitably programmed microprocessor. The secondarys resonant frequency is about 230kHz far above the audio range.

The resulting pitch is a low fidelity square wave like sound reminiscent of an analog synthesizer. It is a variety of a solid state Tesla coil that has been modified to produce musical tones by modulating its spark output. Each spark is pushing on the air and can create a sound.

Music can be played by controlling the length and frequency of the pulses you send to the coil. This happens when the primary coil shoots the current into the. The principle behind the Tesla coil is to achieve a phenomenon called resonance.

Now to better understand what a radio frequency oscillator is lets take one further step back to first understand an electronic oscillator. The self-oscillating coil though is driven by pulses from a spark gap or lower-frequency oscillator which is in the audible range. So how does it make music.

Confident in the science DiPrima connected his homemade Tesla coil to his Casio keyboard with some basic interface circuitry in between. A small voltage is like a near-flat plain with almost no water flow. The principal behind the Tesla coil is quite simple.