I don't recall if Mario was the first, but it certainly was my intro to Tesla music.
I still go back and watch it about once a year. The only maker in my high school was way into Tesla coils, and I have been Team Tesla (Tesla vs Edison) from the first short form biography of Tesla that I read.
One of Tesla's craziest inventions, to my mind, was discovering that, given the right conditions, a human can survive both high voltage and high current. He developed circuits to increase the frequency of the electricity (I believe a version of that strategy is applied here?), and if the frequency is ridiculously high then the skin effect puts the electricity into your epidermis only. Wikipedia says that 1GHz in copper is 2μm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_effect. I sincerely hope nobody has measured this in human tissue.
Reportedly, it makes you tingly.
This invention is bittersweet to me, because I feel this also marks the beginning of Tesla's transition into canonical Mad Scientist. He figured it was therapeutic and exposed himself to these fields routinely.
Fun! Idea: Could the song be played at 2x or 4x speed, recorded at a high framerate, then slowed down to .5x or .25x so that song is in real-time but the sparking was in slow motion?
This sounds like a midi, but either way, there are resampling algorithms that can change speed, but retain pitch. Or change pitch (this is what autotune does).
I saw a live performance using a 12 foot Tesla coil at Burning Man 2017 It was earthed to a 18 foot tall geodesic dome. They played a medley of tracks and then the base of the Tesla coil mildly exploded and started burning. I went by the next morning and the whole camp had packed up and left. Pretty awesome experience. If anyone knows any more about that project I'd love to hear it.
> I went by the next morning and the whole camp had packed up and left.
That's happened to me at Burning Man too. Entire buildings gone when I wanted to go and ask about what happened last night, like the camp never existed.
I like the anonymity and definitely be aware that no closure or responsibility is possible too!
I'm just going to say that the (1998) combined with calling the technology "obsolete" makes me a bit sad, since I was still using a dot-matrix printer then as I couldn't afford a new inkjet. I had to wait until morning to print out my papers if I procrastinated too late the night before!
My understanding is that the frequency is such that it doesn't interact with anything in the human body neither the heart nor the nervous system but I would expect that an arc to the eye would cause some amount of UV damage.
If you're referring to where it appears to hit his head, he actually has on a "helmet" of sorts that's made out of rows of thin wire, so the arc is actually hitting that. The suit is not just for show - my understanding is it would be very dangerous to stand that close to those coils otherwise.
I don't know all the ins and outs of the safety of interacting with these things, but I do think one concern if you were to get hit by one of the arcs is skin burns.
There are kits for building plasma speakers, but the 1" arc is a lot less impressive. It's still a little mind-blowing that an electrical arc can make sound.
'The internet is obsessed with two songs and two songs only. But for different reasons. The first is Smash Mouth’s “All Star.”'... 'The world wide web’s other musical obsession though legitimately rules—Toto’s “Africa.”'
I think "Never gonna give you up" is different. It's the basis of a prank, it is silly, but it does not inspire the same level of dedication to re-creating or really any kind of creativity around musical effort as two other songs:
- Sandstorm / Darude [1]
- Africa / Toto
"All star" is closer to "Never gonna give you up" due to it being a sort of tongue-in-cheek ironic kinda thing due to how bad it really is. "All star" also has close proximity to the Shrek based meme subcultures / trends, and gains popularity from that as well. (see: Shrek is love, shrek is life and similar greentexts)
plasma audio can be dangerous b/c of the ionisation; here is a guy who went around demonstrating one, who ended up with ozone poisoning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msE14cWTwKI
There's no way that thing is still working, even if the story is true. (The location is "undisclosed" so it would be easy to just claim you did it but take it home with you.)
If it really is still out there, it's not much better than litter.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD5oIegFKXg
I still go back and watch it about once a year. The only maker in my high school was way into Tesla coils, and I have been Team Tesla (Tesla vs Edison) from the first short form biography of Tesla that I read.
One of Tesla's craziest inventions, to my mind, was discovering that, given the right conditions, a human can survive both high voltage and high current. He developed circuits to increase the frequency of the electricity (I believe a version of that strategy is applied here?), and if the frequency is ridiculously high then the skin effect puts the electricity into your epidermis only. Wikipedia says that 1GHz in copper is 2μm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_effect. I sincerely hope nobody has measured this in human tissue.
Reportedly, it makes you tingly.
This invention is bittersweet to me, because I feel this also marks the beginning of Tesla's transition into canonical Mad Scientist. He figured it was therapeutic and exposed himself to these fields routinely.
Dammit, I really wish when people would do this stuff they would not add backing tracks.
It's not quite as visually impressive as those tesla coils though.
https://youtu.be/1MJ2g7Eb0QE
That's happened to me at Burning Man too. Entire buildings gone when I wanted to go and ask about what happened last night, like the camp never existed.
I like the anonymity and definitely be aware that no closure or responsibility is possible too!
I was camped right next to it, and I work with one of the people who built it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8I6qt_Z0Cg
https://youtu.be/M91AYp3_x5k?t=122
He also has some small tabletop-sized coils that are really neat:
https://youtu.be/li3rGKFfQ1A?t=18
And here's the Ghostbusters theme at one of their performances while spectators are standing inside the cage:
https://youtu.be/bTkjgBRiCsE?t=2198
My understanding is that the frequency is such that it doesn't interact with anything in the human body neither the heart nor the nervous system but I would expect that an arc to the eye would cause some amount of UV damage.
I don't know all the ins and outs of the safety of interacting with these things, but I do think one concern if you were to get hit by one of the arcs is skin burns.
Ed: https://youtu.be/LtQUJMBH8uE
Surely this is in with a shout? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
- Chopin: Nocturnes Op 9
- Mozart: Requiem - Lacrimosa
- Beethoven: Sonata No 14 (aka Moonlight Sonata), 1st Movement
- Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody
Speaking of, anyone who's never heard the whole thing owes it to themselves to give it a listen. The 3rd movement is off the chain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tr0otuiQuU
- Sandstorm / Darude [1]
- Africa / Toto
"All star" is closer to "Never gonna give you up" due to it being a sort of tongue-in-cheek ironic kinda thing due to how bad it really is. "All star" also has close proximity to the Shrek based meme subcultures / trends, and gains popularity from that as well. (see: Shrek is love, shrek is life and similar greentexts)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXfnrEguhxA&t=8s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmfHHLfbjNQ
Electricity is both awesome and terrifying
Update: somebody beat them to it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psoLXEBmfRg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCuP7ABO_Go
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/toto-africa-lo...
If it really is still out there, it's not much better than litter.