Have you ever wanted to improve your ping pong game while listening to your favorite songs? Well Seattle’s Mark Wheeler has invented exactly the device you’ve been waiting for with Ping Pong FM – a ping pong table that forces you to play well or it intentionally messes up your listening experience.
Players are encouraged to play along fast enough that the song’s tempo is maintained. If you’re too slow the music will sound like someone’s resurrected DJ Screw and he’s having his way with your library; if you stop, the music grinds to a halt completely.
Wheeler managed to achieve this by placing contact microphones inside the ping pong paddles and using an Arduino system (that’s cunning hidden inside a retro radio case) alongside an app to control all the parameters. The contact mics register the sound of the ball hitting the paddle and transmit this information to the Arduino “brain” which lets the app know the tempo – to put it in bare music production terms it’s a bit like a combination of an envelope follower and a “tap tempo” button.
Wheeler is currently looking for partners to take the system to events or set up a permanent home for the Ping Pong FM system. [via The Verge]
