Soundcubed

In a musical composition there are components that structure the music. How could we, in a visual, interactive and easy way, teach the building of music? And in the same time let youth use their creativity to compose their own music? Different materials have different qualities, like different qualities in music gives different expression. In a musical piece we often have a mix of these qualities. Even the same melodies can perceive new and changed if played in other characteristics. Could we show this represented by physical properties of particular materials? When we started generating ideas, we were immediately fascinated by the composition of a  “song” or a “tune”. We knew we wanted to teach our users how a composition is built and what  parts it is made up of. Additionally, we were interested in looking into the characteristics and  sounds associated with different materials. So, we decided to combine the two. We decided on  going for a new ...

When our model arrived at Rockheim, the stage was set for the world to witness SoundCubed. At first we were having rather major issues with the RFID sensor, who decided to take the day off on Sunday. We were therefore somewhat worried that this would continue on Monday. Luckily it didn’t... The model worked rather flawlessly, and we quickly forgave the unfortunate behaviour of the past day. In terms of feedback from the audience, it was very positive. Not only did those who try it say it was cool, it also showed on their emotional response and the fact that many spent considerable time testing the model. This was exactly how we intended it to be used; no rules/manual, just exploration. The employees at Rockheim were also positive in their feedback, and asked us to exhibit the model for a weekend. During this exhibition, we also received much positive response from the outside visitors. As for the external sensor, we didn’t catch who it was… So we don’t know.     ...

This week, the last week before the deadline, we put all other projects aside as we attempted to finish our prototype. We’ve spent a lot of time in the workshop, making the physical parts of our installation, such as the “table” and the cubes. We discussed what materials to use and what techniques to adopt so as to achieve our envisioned result. For example, under the slider, we have acrylic plates that we wanted the lights to shine through in a flush motion. After testing them we discovered that they wouldn’t work such as they were, since you could see the individual leds underneath. We placed different materials between the acrylic and the leds to try and achieve the even light that we wanted and ended up being pretty satisfied with the light when we placed white paper sheets between.                       All the sound files have been inserted into the code and our sorting system is up and running. The code for the leds...