Furniture Final

For my Furniture Design I chose to design chairs that respond to visual generations of sound waves. I wanted to create an object that would be responsive to personal taste as any form of audio can be used to generate a chair for the user.

I used both Grasshopper from Rhino 3D and Processing. In Processing I used the Sound library which allowed me to import sound files and then extract information like amplitude. To generate the proper image I had to first tune the graph to fit inside the image size I set. My first image was a line graph which quickly became unmanageable in Grasshopper. Grasshopper processes images by pushing a grid through the image and outputting a value of 0 to 1 for darkness or 0 to 255 for colour. To do this I needed to push a grid through it however that was both unmanagable, CPU expensive, and would only create a outline of the image of sound instead of values from the sound.

To solve this I changed it from a linegraph to a barcode pattern with grayscale so I this I constructed a curve with points raised 0 to 1 based on the darkness of the pixel based on the amplitude of the song. being barcode I could push a single row of points through the image truncated to a single line of pixels.

After this it was setting base points for each part of the chair like the legs, spine, and supports and then adjusting the subcurve. I had to set parameters so specifically so that it could work with the laser cutter. I found it was an excellent choice as 3d Printing would be both less detailed as well as cumbersome continuous production.

Curve generated from a sound wave

Chair generated from subcurves of the song

Chair dissassembled and distributed on a plane

2D generation of the dissassembled chair ready for 1/4 inch laser cut material.

Some design troubles I came across when designing the chair was building a support that would align all the bars as well I added a hole for aligning the chair legs to the support.

Early rendering, lacks solid bodies and parts overlap

First test model built with printed parts glued to cut foamcore.

For the test build I cut into the seat's bars to align the support however for the final build I reversed this as cutting into the support would properly align each bar of the seat along the length of the support.