During the process of development, I wondered whether instead of the rather simple piezo buzzer, there are other possibilities to save and produce sound. It would be funny if the cow could actually really make her original "Muhhhhh" sound.
There are a couple of possibilities indeed. However, it seems to be quite complicated. Either the quality of the sound ends up very poor or he equipment is quite expensive and complicated to use.
The first way is to use an audio shield for the Arduino. The shield consists of an onboard DAC, filter and op-amp and an SD card.
It is quite hard to build this kind of tool. I tried to find out where all components are available, but it turned out that already the appropriate SD card holder is quite difficult to find. If there is SD card holder is not available, the card could also be inside a camera. Unfortunately, that would make the project unnecessary big and another way to connect the USB from the camera to the Arduino needs to be found.
Moreover, writing a program for the music library that is supposed to make playing music easy is quite challenging. It would be a total different approach to what I have programmed so far.
Another key point to consider is that the music files cannot be compressed. It has to be ".wav". Converting anything to .wav may not be that complicated. Nevertheless, a lot of space will be needed to store the file.
The second possible way to achieve some sound quality is to use a Pulse-width modulation (PWM). According to Wikipedia "PWM of a signal or power source involves the modulation of its duty cycle, to either convey information over a communications channel or control the amount of power sent to a load."
Though this is a relatively cheap way to duplicate sounds, many programs need to be downloaded for a successful execution and a computer needs to be connected throughout. When watching the video it surely becomes obvious that this process is tricky.
There is no problem to save sound when using programs such as Max MSP. Since I am interested in building a digital sculpture that does not depend on a connected computer, but that works on its own, this option cannot be considered.
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