Sophia Brueckner’s Touch Sensitive Musical Painting is part painting and part MIDI controller, an interactive artwork that lets you create music.
Brueckner looks beyond traditional MIDI controllers to create a musical interface that’s artistic and completely original.
Here’s what Brueckner has to say about it:
This musical painting is a graphical score that you touch to play melodies and harmonies. It incorporates visual composition, musical composition, and gestural interaction to create a new form of visual music where the composition and the instrument are combined together.
The painting itself is made with acrylic paint, conductive paint, colored pencil, and nails on a wood panel. A Teensy USB development board is used to send MIDI to generate the sound.
Brueckner has shared a tutorial on creating the Touch Sensitive Musical Painting at the Instructable site.
via Chris Stack
Brilliant stuff!
Wonder what it be like on the classic Elvis on black felt
Would be cooler if she used conductive paint instead of metal contacts. But the is fun.
The article and instructable does mention that it uses conductive paint. Although I was thinking the same thing before I read that. Would be a good evolution of the project to come up with something where the nails weren’t so apparent.
I am thinking this would be a great project to work on with the kids. I have a raspberry Pi not doing anything currently…
The black paint is conductive…the nails are there to solder to on the back. A lot of people interact with this, so we wanted it to be sturdy. There’s probably many other ways to do this…maybe metal tacks without the nail heads? Or drilled holes filled with paint? Canvas with conductive thread? The nails ended up being nice though…I think people liked having something tactile.
Absolutely lovely. Such a great idea!
Also, this project was a collaboration between me and Eric Rosenbaum (http://web.media.mit.edu/~ericr/), one of the brilliant people behind MaKey MaKey!