Weird Inventions: Making Music with Bananas | Earth Science

This is Yuri. He's a sound artist and an inventor and we asked him to show us how to make music with bananas. He experiments with different objects and comes up with new ways to make music. I would like to introduce this project. We basically want to play music from banana. So this experiment you can do at your home and what you need is basically banana and also crocodile clips and copper wire and a piano circuit. I'm going to start from cutting this Copper's atomic number and structure means each atom has this one little electron on its own that's free to move around away from the rest of its atom. When you connect a power source to a copper circuit that little electron is given a push which makes it jump from atom to atom in one particular direction and together they form your electric current. Make sure to put around the cable and the crocodile clip make sure you're not direct to touch copper wires to avoid electric shock. For this project we're using an Ototo piano circuit made by Yuri but it is important to remember that there are other pre-made piano circuits out there. So Ototo looks like a circuit board and has got two batteries and also one speaker and and if you turn on you can play like piano. I created this device back 2015 so I want to make a platform like some device people without any knowledge about technical knowledge can do any complicated musical technical project. Each touchpad acts as a capacitor which works by identifying when extra charge is being drawn from that point. This is called capacitive touch. In smartphones for example capacitive touch technology is used to pinpoint where exactly your finger is interacting with the phone. Your body becomes a human capacitor drawing current from the circuit and the phone's microchip can sense the change in current. The same theory works for our music project. Now we know what is capacitive sensitive touches so now you can connect this electrode to the conductive material you can play like piano. Once your finger touches the banana the charge that your body draws is detected and a note is played. Bananas work nicely as keys because inside the fruit juices contain positively charged refloating potassium ions. When you add a negatively charged current to these ions they are able to flow freely and carry the current without too much resistance. Bananas are not only object performance touchpad you can actually use any other conductive material and you can make same performance. The best thing is you don't need any musical knowledge you just join to your favorite music. And I think we'll just let Yuri have his fun. Let us know if you give the musical banana experiment a try and don't forget to hit that like button and subscribe to EarthLab for more weird and wonderful science videos.