MIDI Player

Company: Blip Blip Industries

Year: 2013

Role: Creative Technologist

The brief

Blip Blip Industries wanted to promote their expertise in different creative areas: advertisement, art direction, interactive experiences.

The process

We created the MIDI player to bring a new sound into the world. This is the union between one of the oldest musical sounds - water in a vase - with the technology used to activate it. 

We wanted to be very different from anything that was around at the time and wanted to show the contrast between the roughness of untreated wood and the softness of the music it produced. We investigated different ways to activate the sounds and finally decided to go with the beating, since it creates an enchanting mix of sounds.

The outcome

We made a video that showed the player live and synchronised with a song in real time. It was also a homage to Walter Ferguson and his song “Computer”.

My role and takeaways

I built the MIDI player using Arduino, for all the electronics, and Pure Data to translate the sound into electrical pulses. Each glass was tuned to a specific note and had its own wooden stick associated to make it sound. I learned how to map MIDI sounds to specific actions and how to read MIDIs in real time from Pure Data.