Dr. Damien's Homemade Marimba uses LabVIEW for tuning the Keys

[Rick_K]

Dr. Damien, aka DFGray on the forums, has been working on building a homemade marimba. I was able to see some of his wood working prowess today at an internal NI science fair. He explained how the notch under each key and the length of the key creates the tone. In the longer keys (lower notes) he must customize the notch shape to account for 2nd and 3rd harmonics of the tone. Already an accomplished wood worker, he did all his grinding and tuning using LabVIEW to characterize the tone in the frequency spectrum to place the peaks at exactly the right frequency.

He has been using the forums as a journal of his work. Each of posts links to all the previous posts. Check out his latest stuff by searching Dr. Damien in the forums