Our attempt at Montessori-style music composition with blocks
With a team of new friends, I got to build a musical instrument that combines LEGOs and Arduino. An ultrasonic distance sensor hangs under a gantry and plays different notes according to the LEGOs underneath it. Our hurried first build was fragile, but pulled off a successful live demo in front of the audience.
Thanks to Nora’s suggestion to join the facebook group Hackathon Hackers, I found out about an event I couldn’t pass up: a music/technology hackathon put on by a the People’s Music School (@PeoplesMusicSch ). Only trouble was I was living 300 miles away at a cabin in the woods of Southern IL. Luckily I wasn’t too far from an Amtrak station, and I scheduled a roundtrip on the City of New Orleans inside of the 24 hours I had off work (it seemed that way at the time).
After a few hours of spotty sleep on the train, and a drowsy cab ride to Merchandise Mart, I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to walk off the elevator into a sunlit atrium filled with the sounds of a string quartet. Throughout the day a few students of the music school would set up in one room or another to give a soundtrack to the brainstorming and building. It was awesome.
This was the first hackathon I’d participated in. The way teams were divvied up was a bit awkward: after opening remarks, the audience was asked if anyone had an idea for a team yet — perhaps they were expecting more small groups to show up ready to go, but I think most of the people came as individuals. So instead a few people introduced themselves and said what comes to their mind when they think about tech / music / education. I introduced myself and said I liked to use Arduino to teach music and coding.
In the coffeecake fueled team-forming mingling that came afterward, I was approached by a couple different people who had ideas for software to help people learn music, and I ended up sitting down with a couple of women who had kids studying music — it was a lot of fun to think about what makes practicing difficult for anyone (I had dropped out of music school a few years before partly because I couldn’t quite stomach the 4 hours a day in the practice booth that my professors recommended).
We identified that the repetition of material coupled with the lack of feedback makes sitting in a practice room a pretty dull experience. So we brainstormed ways of automating feedback — perhaps a program could take a recorded example of a teacher playing a passage, and compare a student trying to copy it. I still think a computer could quickly point out wrong notes and wrong timing so that you don’t practice the same passage incorrectly over and over, but we agreed that replacing a music teacher with an app was pretty pie-in-the-sky.
People’s movement from one team to another was pretty fluid, which was great — it meant ideas got around. Having people work around each other openly, brainstorming on white boards makes it pretty easy to join a conversation, and not long after, join a team. After bouncing ideas off a few different people during the morning, I came across a table scattered with LEGOs. Alex and Ania had brought their hack-kit with them and already had some beeps going on while constructing lego towers. Of course I sat down to ask them what they had going on. Alex had seen an Instuctables for an Arduino Distance Sensor with Buzzer and LED before coming to the hackathon and brought his Arduino, distance sensor, and piezo buzzer. After catching me up, he complained that his main concern is that the buzzer wasn’t a loud enough output. I showed him that it was really easy to control the sound from a laptop via Arduino, but he insisted that he doesn’t want the product to be tethered to a computer to work. Luckily (well, I was going to a music-tech hackathon) I had speakers and transistors in my laptop bag and built two simple one-transistor amplifiers to output some simple square wave tones. We rubber-banded the mini breadboard to the top of their gantry. Happy with the improvement, they let me join their team and commence a couple hours of programming and debugging to get each note of a major scale to be triggered by a particular height of LEGOs.
The live demo went great, playing a melody up and down a major scale (cleverly avoiding the bug we never worked out when going from the highest tower back down to nothing). Among the rest of the presentations, ours was the only one that was more than theoretical (though there were some web mockups that were pretty impressive for 6 hours of design time). I’d still like to explore software that compares a student practicing to some standard and tells the student what they can do to improve. I’d also like to actually build FORTissimo as a kit. It really would be pretty cheap and versatile. But for now it was just a fun weekend.
Code is at https://github.com/jazzyjackson/FORTissimo/