MADEONEARTH

The Sound of Music Blocks

The Tangible Music Sequencer lets people of all Each box is controlled by a Freescale 8-bit musical abilities feel like Julie Andrews conducting microcontroller, sends signals via infrared, and uses an orchestra of robotic von Trapp children. Panasonic low-power RF modules to communicate

The Sequencer is a collection of candy-colored, with a hub on the host computer. The host doesn’t palm-sized boxes that semi-autonomously “play just upload sounds to the boxes; it also calculates together” by making sounds (and light) and then what each sound “looks like” in blinking light, and triggering adjacent blocks to follow. Simple soft- uploads this info to the blocks for great visual effect. ware lets you drag-and-drop any sounds, such as “I wanted to make the simplest musical instru-drumbeats, words, or even whole songs, onto icons ment possible that allows for expression and yet representing the blocks. You then place the physical makes immediately recognizable music,” says blocks in any configuration — next to each other, Bernstein. “The idea is not to make John Cage.” one after the other, or in forks — and press their For Bernstein, the success of his Sequencer will be Play buttons to hear the sequence of sounds you’ve determined by the surprising interactions between created. If you press multiple Play buttons, you can users and the instrument. He’s working on manufac-create polyphony or other overlapping sequences turing his Sequencer, and ultimately getting it into the of simultaneous sounds. You can also move the hands of everyone from DJs to kids to orchestras. blocks back and forth to make them repeat. “People have this idea that what they make is

“I’m taking advantage of the knowledge people have theirs, that they have exclusive control over how it’ll of interacting with their surroundings, and giving them be used, but I think that’s counterproductive.” a simple, yet expressive way of using it,” says Jeffrey —Nicole Oncina Traer Bernstein, a Ph.D. student at Princeton’s Sound

Lab, and the maker of the Sequencer. >>Princeton Sound Lab: soundlab.cs.princeton.edu

Photograph by Jeffrey Traer Bernstein

22 Make: Volume 09