On Sun, 2 Jun 2024 22:41:57 +0000 "dan penoff.com via Mercedes"
<mercedes@okiebenz.com> wrote:
> Coming to Jim's comments, this game actually had a “soundtrack” in the
> sense that there was an 8-track tape player with a very short tape in
> it that played different sounds or sayings at the appropriate times.
When I was an undergrad at Caltech, we had in the fall an activity called
the Interhouse Dance, which, contrary to its name, had very little
dancing. Each of the seven student Houses would build a more-or-less
elaborate carnival display through which the vistors would travel.
My freshman year ('67) my student House (Blacker) had the theme of Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs and was especially elaborate. It included a
paper mache mountain 25' high over an area of perhaps 1800 ft^2 held up
by telephone poles and many 2x4s, complete with a flooded courtyard with
small bridges and paths through the insides of the mountain which had
several stops, not unlike Disneyland.
One of the "exhibits" I helped with was a wishing well into which people
would toss coins (or small rocks :-) ). Down the well and out of sight
was a small piece of thin plywood which was connected to a microswitch
such that when the plywood was hit it would actuate the microswitch
before the coin fell off.
This was connected to some relays and a stereo tape recorder playing a
tape loop. One channel of the tape loop was a splash sound and the other
were two tone bursts:
- One just before the splash sound of a pitch interpreted by
some electronics and relay to connect a loudspeaker to the
tape recorder's amplifier, and,
- The other after the splash sound of a pitch to disconnect
the loudspeaker.
So, when someone tossed in a coin, one would later hear a splash. The
time delay between tossing the coin and hearing the sound, of course,
would depend upon exactly where in its looping the tape loop was when
the microswitch was actuated.
Showing the audience, when we took the display apart late that the night,
we found someone had computed the mean and standard deviation and written
them on the sign.
Craig
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