Written on June 16, 2008 – 8:42 am | by Bogdan Alex |
I remember seeing some Tesla coils singing last year. I mean don’t get any weird ideas… they don’t have a voice of their own. They can only be used as plasma arc speakers. Plasma arc speakers have been around for some time now, but they are very pricey. Tesla coils are much larger versions, producing some cool visual effects with the emitted sounds. It’s almost like having a Winamp visualizer included in the coils for each sound emitted. The visual part is represented, of course, by those electric arcs bursting into cool patterns every time the sound frequency changes. ArcAttack took a couple of Tesla coils and transformed them into world’s first Singing Tesla Coils High-Voltage DJ system.

ArcAttack is among the first AV-DJ groups to use such intriguing sound-producing methods. The two Tesla coils they use can produce sounds similar to those original analogue synthesizers which were very popular in the 1970s and 1980s.

The following clip was shot at Flipside 2008 by Sean Savage. It depicts the ArcAttack team playing “Popcorn” on their High-Voltage DJ system. Keep in mind that this is no music-synchronied light show, as the arcs themselves are playing the synthesizer part and if you get too close to them you might be “rewarded” with some nice toasty wounds.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cheesebikini/2571801909/

For more clips check out the ArcAttack official site.

Additionally, you might want to take a look at these two clips that present some other singing Tesla coils: