- [Narrator] Science and
music have been a passion
of mine since I was very young,
and so they just came
together very naturally.
(rock music)
And when I saw an avenue
where I could solidly
take music and science
and merge them together
in a super odd way you
know it's hard to resist.
(rock music)
(high pitch electrical music)
(upbeat music)
- [Narrator] Architect is
a performance art group
that specializes in homemade instruments,
and we use science to make music.
Our main crew consists of three people
we just picked up a fourth person actually
that's been going on more
and more shows with us.
We made our first musical
tesla coils in 2005.
A tesla coil is a high voltage transformer
that takes a voltage and it
converts it to another voltage.
And the voltage gets so high
that it creates an
artificial lightning bolt.
And so the singing tesla coil
you hear it playing music,
but the music is actually
coming from the spark.
So the lightning bolt is
actually shaking the air
and creating sound pressure waves;
and we can change the frequency
of the spark to create
different musical pitches.
What we've developed here is something
that is it's own unique instrument.
(high pitch electrical music)
(upbeat music)
The Faraday Suit is a
metal Suit; you wear it.
It's made out of chainmail
which are just chain links
that are all put together.
They're more conductive than your body.
So when you wear the suit and
you get zapped by lightning
the suit protects you from the lightning.
We use the suit as a
special effect in our show
we use it to play our lightning guitar.
It allows us to actually play the guitar
while getting struck by lightning
and people are in to that you know
because it looks dangerous.
It is dangerous if you
don't have the skills.
(electric guitar strumming)
(crowd cheering)
- [Crowd] Three, two, one!
(bang)
(crowd cheering)
- [Narrator] We like to go
out there and show people
that you can actually
have fun with science.
Right, it doesn't have to be
just some super boring thing
that you see in a classroom.
When we do our public shows
we'll do some cool science
demos, but we have fun
and we play music, you know,
and then we get some audience participants
to come up and get zapped by lightning.
Without the educational aspects, what
we do would be incredibly pointless.
It gives us a chance to
take our technical skills
and put some of that knowledge out there
and actually have some of
that benefit to all of it.
Kids are attracted to things
that just can't easily
be explained; and you know, lets face it,
like, electricity is basically magic.
The possibilities of what you can do
with electricity are nearly endless.
(soft rock music)
