Makey Makey

I had some trouble getting rubber to the road for this project, I put myself under some pressure to try and reinvent the wheel eight different times. To my detriment I think I forgot to just have fun with it for a while.

...3 days later...

This project and spoke to me not because I'm a music teacher, but because I have recently dove into designing and building my own electronic instruments using Arduino. I never played with a Makey Makey before so after worrying too much about making something fantastic I grabbed my thingamajig box and started hooking wires up to things and fooling around with the apps.

Recipe for... Fun!

This, of course, turned out to be a better catalyst than any amount of thinking I had done and soon after I started I was taking apart my french press to try and make a trigger out of that. My lovely girlfriend came home after a long day to find a mess in the kitchen, but this time it was a mess of wires!

Grounding

After experimenting with different methods of grounding and completing circuits I came up with a "Side-dish-o-phone"!

My experimentation yielded these "observations"...

-French Press was the coolest to use but most temperamental.
-Pickles were the most consistent to trigger sounds.
-I needed to wrap a chopstick in foil for it to work.
-Kimchi was as easy to play as the pickles(salty & wet?)
-Ice cream worked equally well frozen and soft.
-Tea bag needed to have a completely soaked string for it to work well.
-Hummus was fun!

Here is a video of the note demonstration:

I also had a little bit of fun the the french press, some butter knifes and the program "Soundplant". Soundplant is essentially a sample cue application. You can load up audio files to play and assign them to play after the designated keyboard key is pressed. I couldn't resist using an audio clip from one of my other projects to nerd-out a little bit!

The short essay with Jay Silver resonated with my drive to develop an "Invention Literacy" not only within myself, but with my students as well. I have found that creating my own midi instruments has made me feel more "alive" than I have for a long time.

For those curious I keep a process portfolio with my different projects. Check it out here!

Scratch program for Makey Makey: See Inside