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Ross Crawford / projects / trainmusic

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Train Music!!

This is one of those wacky things that you just come across by accident. I was testing train motors just connecting them direct to a controller, and was thinking how they generate a lot of gear noise, then suddenly realised it was actually playing notes!!

After a bit of investigating, it seems the notes it plays are actually slightly useful. It appears they correspond to the first 6 standing-wave overtones. Thus if we use a fundamental “C1” tone, the notes played for each power setting are:

C2
G2
C3
E3
G3
B-flat 4 (actually slightly flatter than B-flat)

This may seem pretty useless, but these notes are, in fact, the notes which can be played by most valve-less brass instruments. So this means you can play a lot of stuff written for the bugle, so I’ve included a “Lego train” version of the Last Post below for your enjoyment!

I figured out fairly fast, however, that it’s fairly difficult to play without having an on/off switch. So I designed one, and here it is.

Site last modified November 4, 2004 Home

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