Original inspiration: Jean Michel Jarre:
More recently, several enthusiasts have pioneered the development of DIY laser harps. In particular, Stephen Hobley has published an excellent series of articles on the construction of a laser harp and his blog provides what is probably the definitive history of the development of this instrument.
Stephen has also produced some fine videos of him performing on his laser harp:
The only drawback with the design approach adopted by Stephen is that it requires a fair amount of time, skill, and manual dexterity to assemble the mechanical hardware and electronics that comprise the laser harp. The end results are undeniably impressive, but you would need to be fairly committed to embark on a construction project of this nature.
The easy way out would, of course, be to buy a ready made laser harp off-the-shelf. Until recently this would not have been possible, but at least one company, Kroma Laser has now started to sell ready made units:
which look pretty cool in performance, thanks to their combination of red and green lasers:
Yes, all this can be yours if you can afford the $1790 it costs for one of these units! But if your budget does not quite stretch this far, don't worry, there is another solution that does not involve slaving away for hours over a hot soldering iron or forking out $$$. This blog will describe a project to build your own laser harp using standard off-the-shelf hardware linked to a open source software application that manages all the clever stuff and drives your MIDI synthesizer, and all for less than $700.
While I was working on this project, I came across another laser harp enthusiast, Rune Foshaug, who appears to have adopted exactly the same approach, i.e. standard hardware linked to a software based laser control system. As far as I am aware, Rune has not published details of how to build a laser harp to the same specification as his, but hopefully the open source project lined to this blog will fill that gap. By the way, Rune has also made some stunning videos of his laser harp performances, which should get you inspired if nothing else does.
