Jay Silver successfully crowd funded his Makey Makey invention kit back in 2012 and its come as no surprise to see makers designing unusual musical instruments (and a boatload of game controllers) with them since the kits release. One of the more unusual musical instruments to be made from kit is Jenna deBoisblanc’s MaKey MaKey Monome, which looks like a futuristic LED-light piano of sorts.
Jenna designed the touchscreen musical instrument using the invention kit along with some NeoPixels, some copper tape and cardboard. The cardboard acts as the latticework that houses the individually addressable LEDs that light-up the instrument’s squares, which is covered by a 22-inch piece of glass covered on the bottom with white paper to diffuse the light. 64 copper triggers are positioned over the glass, light the corresponding LED and generate a tone when touched. The MaKey MaKey kit translates those individual ‘touchscreens’ into sounds using Jenna’s Processing Sketch music software, which assigns a different note to each touch-square and thereby creating beautiful music with the added bonus of a light show.
Apparently, the MaKey MaKey kit can be swapped out for an Arduino for those that prefer the development board. See at Instructables or the project page…
See the first video in the series here:
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