Chapter 10
The Amazing Tunebot
In the classic movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the (hopefully) friendly aliens reach out to us lowly humans with a series of five musical notes. We assume these five notes mean “yes we come in peace,” but as Steven Spielberg never made a sequel to his film, for all we know they were really saying “we like earthlings medium rare.”
Brain-eating space invaders notwithstanding, music has long served as a form of language. Music transcends generations and cultures. So, too, your robot can communicate using music. Previous chapters provided sound-making functionality using just the Arduino, or in the case of the enhanced Teachbot in Chapter 9, a voice box co-processor. But there’s more. With a low-cost synthesizer ...