Musical Umbrella Turns The City Into A Symphony

It’s a rainy Summer here in Amsterdam, so let’s stay with the umbrella theme. Thanks to Make we found out about this rather cool umbrella that’s able to play music when it rains. For the occasion of Music Hackday 2012 in Amsterdam, Berlin-based hackers Alice Zappe and Julia Lager managed to create a musical umbrella that produces a random series of lo-fi 8-bit tones as soon as rain drops fall on it. Watch the video below to find out how it works:

“When raindrops strike the outside surface of the umbrella canopy, they are converted to tones by the the presence of twelve piezo pickup sensors which are taped to the underside of the umbrella and respond to vibration”, is explained on LikeCool. “The piezo’s are then fed into an Arduino Uno, (…), which is in turn connected to two speakers.” Large numbers of those umbrellas may turn the city into a pretty cool symphony…