Miasmatic Review

I'd like to see this in a concert.

Not in a million years did I think that a Tesla Coil could be a musical instrument. That is until I saw this clip. They played some video game theme music from Super Mario Brothers and Tetris. So all of us old Nintendo geeks should recognize at least those parts. A U of I Urbana-Champaign student Steve Ward built the coil.

According to the blurb with the video:

So just to explain a little further, yes, it is the actual high voltage sparks that are making the noise. Every cycle of the music is a burst of sparks at 41 KHz, triggered by digital circuitry at the end of a "long" piece of fiber optics.

What's not immediately obvious in this video is how loud this is. Many people were covering their ears, dogs were barking. In the sections where the crowd is cheering and the coils is starting and stopping, you can hear the the crowd is drowned out by the coil when it's firing.