Ever wondered if you could use wind chimes as a MIDI controller? Well now you can, using nothing but cutlery, aluminium foil, copper strips, copper wire and a Makey Makey development board.
I've been working a lot lately with Max 6. For those of you who aren't familiar with Max it is essentially a programming environment designed primarily for the production and control of audio and video. As part of my degree I'll be using it a lot this year, and as a bit of light relief yesterday I used it to build this little beauty.
Not the best video quality I grant you, but you get the basic idea. The forks are connected to the arrow key inputs on the Makey Makey, and the knives are connected to the ground input so that when the forks strike the knives the circuit is completed and the computer receives key press commands. I used Max to interpret these commands as MIDI note messages, and sent them to a basic soft synth using a triangle wave with a ridiculously long decay time, and voila!
You can download my Max patch here (right click and save as), or if you don't have Max you can view my annotated patch below.
"Wow I didn't know that! But it's amazing how you put it altogether. A brilliant discovery which can be useful in the future.
ReplyDeleteTheBestOfChimes.com"
how did you set up your makey makey with the forks cause I put each forks in the up/down left/right parts of the makey makey and grounded it but not getting any feedback????
ReplyDeleteI forgot to add that I setup the same max patch as well......help please?
ReplyDeleteYou need to organise the cutlery so that there's a grounded piece between each pair that is connected to a key, so for example: K G K K G K. In my example the knives are grounded and the forks are connected to the key inputs.
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