The Making Music Studio was an exhibit created while working for the Children’s Creativity Museum. This was a large, 2 year project developed and fabricated in collaboration with Weldon Exhibits, and funded by a generous IMLS grant. Our goal was to replace the existing music studio, a green screen karaoke experience, with a new exhibit that enabled sound making, instrument building, and song writing in a collaborative, multi-generational context. What we came up with involved 3 major areas: a set of instrument building stations, an early childhood area featuring giant music boxes and a musical train, and a My Soundtrack area where children and families could create their own songs using custom recording pods.
My Soundtrack was the main attraction of this new exhibit. Visitors were able to record their own multi-track songs in 4 different pods (Percussion, Synth, Vocals, Sampler) using RFID song badges to move from station to station. At the end there was a final mixing desk featuring a giant touchscreen and an emailing kiosk for sharing songs. Bryan Day, our Exhibits Specialist, and I created the custom recording system that powered the My Soundtrack experience. I worked on the system design and musical instruments, and Bryan wrote the custom Processing software. I also created the custom Arduino-based RFID readers. The system involved 7 networked computers, various sized touch screens, and several electronic musical controllers including a Roland Handsonic and a Linnstrument.
We collaborated with Weldon Exhibits on the Dancin’ Dots interactive. They had a custom carpet with 35 switches embedded under a grid of colorful dots. I connected those switches to a Teensy Microcontroller effectively turning the carpet into a Midi Controller. I wrote a small Processing app that allowed visitors to switch between 6 different instruments.
I developed the interactive for the Melody Train table. The idea for this interactive was that the looping nature of a train track could be compared to a musical loop. Placing different musical tracks in different places in the loop mimics selecting different events on a sequencer. The table featured a special bridge with embedded magnetic hall sensors that would detect small magnets glued into the wooden trains. Powered by a Teensy microcontroller, a note was played when the train drove over any of the 8 sensors. I created custom arcade buttons with embedded Neopixels that allowed visitors to change the note that was played and visualize it with a changing color. This allowed visitors to create simple, short melodies that would play as they drove their train across the bridge.
