Ah, that all too familiar smell of burnt ozone permeates the air signaling the nearby presence of a tesla coil. However, that familiar drone of the discharge isn’t anywhere to be found. Instead I’m hearing a rather buzzy sounding rendition of the theme from the video game Super Mario Brothers.

After squeezing through the crowd at the Maker Faire in New York City this past weekend, I managed to see what was making the noise. It was, in fact, a tesla coil but it was being used as a speaker. Through carefully pulsing the coil at the right frequencies, you can make a coil produce sounds. This makes perfect sense, but now they’ve made this into an easy-to-assemble kit that anyone can buy and play MIDI files through, via a USB connection to a computer.

The OneTesla team is actually three MIT students: Baley Wang, who you see in the video above, Heidi Baumgartner, and Daniel Kramnik. The three are devoted to open source, so the musical coil is completely open. The libraries, schematics, layouts, etc., are all available for download if you wish. However, if you’re like me, you’re really interested in their kit.

The $329 kit includes everything you need to build the singing coil:

One particularly interesting bit about the OneTesla that makes it stand out is the fact that it is polyphonic. Most musical tesla coils I’ve seen (yes, I’ve seen a few), are only capable of playing a single note at a time. The ability to play multiple notes at once really adds to the audio experience. This isn’t immediately evident in the video above, so take a peek at this promotional video taken from their site.

You’re probably wondering about the tech specs of the kit at this point. Here they are from the kit’s sales page.

I can absolutely attest to the fact that seeing one of these in operation so much more impressive than the videos can show. I will most likely be buying one to build with my kids in the near future.

Caleb Kraft is chief community editor on EE Times, where he covers EE Life and the open source for EE Times' Designlines. Caleb has been visiting garages and basements around the globe either literally or via Internet to explore what engineers are doing in in their free time. An enthusiastic tinkerer, Caleb has a tendency to play with high voltage and or dangerous temperatures when given the time.

Caleb Kraft is chief community editor on EE Times, where he covers EE Life and the open source for EE Times' Designlines. Caleb has been visiting garages and basements around the globe either literally or via Internet to explore what engineers are doing in in their free time. An enthusiastic tinkerer, Caleb has a tendency to play with high voltage and or dangerous temperatures when given the time.

When I saw the title of the article, I immediately thought of the 2010 movie, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" and the singing tesla coils in his lab playing music for his girlfriend. 

Yep, there's also a band that uses huge ones. They are named Arc Attack, and you can see a video of them here. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdrqdW4Miao

The videos are interesting and the music is impressive considering the way it is being converted to sound.

It reminds me of an article tha was in Popular Electronics (I belive) about 40 years ago.  Someone put carbon electrodes in the flame of an oxycetalene welding torch and connected them to the outpot of an audio amplifier (possibly with DC bias voltage added) to use the flame as a transducer.  I badly wanted to duplicate the experiment, but alas was a poor teenager without a power amplifier, let alone a welding torch, so can't comment on the quality of the sound produced

Man, that sounds so cool... er, hot. 

When I saw this, it reminded me of the Flame Speakers that were in a NASA

plasma physics project in the late 60s and early 70s. I won the local science fair

top prizes and honarable mention American Patent Law association 1970 in

Baltimore, MD. They are all listed in Research Engineering online. Check it out.

Yep- have seen giant teslas singing at the Oakland 'pre-burning man' festival put on by the Crucible at their Fire Arts festival. Was very impressive. Not as impressive as the propane powered flame blaster however...

Honestly, this isn't new technology at all.  Amateurs have been doing POLYPHONIC music reproduction with Tesla coils for almost 10 years now.  Seems like it only really makes news when students at prestigiuos MIT do it that their efforts get rewarded.

Point is, that this is nothing new.  And if you really want to look at the history of this particular design, it was copied directly from another one board DRSSTC kit that another company, Eastern Voltage Research, has been selling for quite a number of years before OneTesla popped on the scene.  In the original write-up, the designer even states, "Inspired by Eastern Voltage Research's microBrute, I decided to route a DRSSTC onto a 4"x6" board. "

http://www.easternvoltageresearch.com/drsstc_microbrute.html

You could say these individuals just copied this design and repackaged it as their own.  Hardly worth commenting on as if it was cutting edge technology.

Nobody is saying that modulated coils is a new thing. However, a $300 kit that a hobbyist can purchase is very new! Well, it is interesting if nothing else. 

Yes, very true indeed!  Of course, you and I know that these students are not making any money on this, especially if they have liability insurance, which i'm pretty sure they don't.  No underwriter in the world would offer insurance for a kit like this.

Anyways, regardless, i do commend them for their work and it is a very good learning lesson for them.

Of course, Eastern Voltage Research put up a very good answer to their crowdsourcing effort by doing their own crowdsourcing funded Tesla Coil.  Looks pretty sweet, but looks like they aren't making any money on these either based on their prices.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivMkNVQvHXM

The best that I can tell, "All components for the MIDI interrupter (which allows it to play music)" would be a device to keep MIDI from playing.

A MIDI Interpreter would be a device that converts MIDI which would allow it to play music.

I assumed they used the term interrupter meaning that it shuts off the coil at the correct frequency. 

you can see that they call it an interrupter on their site, that wasn't a typo. http://onetesla.com/index.php/products/kits.html 

I think spell check sabotaged them.

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