Credit: Changxi Zheng/Columbia Engineering
A playful “zoolophone,” a metallophone with a variety of animal shapes that were automatically created using a computer algorithm developed by a team of researchers led by Changxi Zheng, assistant professor of computer science at Columbia Engineering. The tone of each key is comparable to those of professionally made metallophones---a demonstration of Zheng's algorithm for computationally designing an object's vibrational properties and sounds.