I attended Spotify’s Monthly Music Hackathon last Saturday! This month’s theme was New Musical Instruments. Needless to say, I was excited about it, since weird musical instruments are near and dear to my heart.
Since you have to bring your own materials, and I wasn’t entirely wedded to a single idea…I brought a lot of my own hardware to experiment with. It was a little chaotic.
My inital plan – to build a drum-like object – wasn’t producing the kind of interaction I wanted, so I started over with about five hours left in the hackathon. Instead I ended up with a sonified sewing project. As you stitch, it creates music.
It’s built with conductive thread and an Arduino (with a basic capsense circuit). Sound synthesis is done in ChucK.
This was my first time at the Monthly Music Hackathon, and I’m hoping to go back next month as well. The entire event was a lot of fun. Especially nice were the talks the evening before: there were many impressive presentations and demos. It left me eager to work on my own projects again, which of course is the best outcome from a hackathon.
