Uploaded October 2012 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
"Music as Material" was the title of a 5 day workshop I conducted with Michael Smith-Welch at ArtEz Institute of the Arts, in Arnhem, Netherlands. The fifteen participants came from backgrounds including music, computer science, theater, industrial design, and fine arts. The workshop was focused on exploring new ways to create musical instruments by connecting physical materials to digital sounds. Many of the projects used our MaKey MaKey kit to create sound triggers from gloves, balloons, fruit, fur, and other materials. The participants used a variety of music production software, programming tools including Scratch, Processing, OpenFrameworks, and other hardware tools including PicoBoard and Arduino. The pieces shown in the video include "The Glove," "Music Ball," "Mini-Drum Set," "Ambient Accumulation," "Fruity Looper," "The Foldable Cord Thingy," "Gut Reaction," "Chordotron," "Balloonophone," "Atmosfur," and "Key Effect." The workshop also included a series of music improvisation games, including "Floor-Head-Hum."
"Music as Material" was the title of a 5 day workshop I conducted with Michael Smith-Welch at ArtEz Institute of the Arts, in Arnhem, Netherlands. The fifteen participants came from backgrounds including music, computer science, theater, industrial design, and fine arts. The workshop was focused on exploring new ways to create musical instruments by connecting physical materials to digital sounds. Many of the projects used our MaKey MaKey kit to create sound triggers from gloves, balloons, fruit, fur, and other materials. The participants used a variety of music production software, programming tools including Scratch, Processing, OpenFrameworks, and other hardware tools including PicoBoard and Arduino. The pieces shown in the video include "The Glove," "Music Ball," "Mini-Drum Set," "Ambient Accumulation," "Fruity Looper," "The Foldable Cord Thingy," "Gut Reaction," "Chordotron," "Balloonophone," "Atmosfur," and "Key Effect." The workshop also included a series of music improvisation games, including "Floor-Head-Hum."
