Snap‘n’Roll: Tuning and Listening to the Progressive Buckling of Reticulated Ensembles

Progressive snap through-buckling is a catastrophic collapse that is observed in slender and shallow structures such as reticulated roofs or gridshells [1]. It is usually triggered by a local instability and it spreads up to a portion or to the entire structure causing the static failure. To predict the extent of a local snap to the surrounding nodes, the mechanical consequences of local instabilities have to be investigated: apart from static force rearrangement, the impulse of the dynamic rebound can force a domino effect. In this work, each dynamic rebound has been tuned to an input frequency note to compose a simple music sequence with progressive collapses of Von Mises Truss ensembles. Local instabilities have been based on the interaction formulation [2] and fully elastic material and perfect connections have been considered for the whole deformation process. Finally, a comparison between perfect and imperfect systems is presented to translate imperfection sensitivity to musical performance.