For this project, I worked with classmate Tres to create a module capable of sequencing multiple non-MIDI instruments.

Ideation

When Tres and I first met for the first time about this project, he had the idea to circuit-bend a children’s instrument, to create some cool sonic effects. I was also interested in this idea, but in the interest of trying to develop something that seemed to be completely undocumented online, I was also interested in developing a form of circuit-bending that would allow us to sequence the instrument as a form of circuit-bending. Because Tres wanted to circuit-bend multiple instruments and I wanted to sequence multiple instruments, we decided that we’d focus on both the sequencing and circuit-bending as we developed our instrument.

First Steps

We started by collecting some children’s instruments. Tres picked up a children’s piano, congas, and guitar. Since he was able to easily find 3 children’s instruments, we decided it would be cool to have our little sequencer sequence 3 different things. This number is important - remember it for later.

these aren’t the exact instruments we used, but they’re close enough -you get the idea.

Second Steps

So, we had our three instruments and we had our idea - now we just had to figure out how to bridge the gap between them. The first thing to do was to figure out the best way to sequence these things. In a typical sequencer, there are two modes - a “write” mode, wherein notes are passed from the user into the instrument, and a “read” mode, where the instrument plays the user-specified notes at a fixed interval (typically adjustable on the fly). While other sequencers are capable of snazzier things, we thought a simplistic “read” and “write” mode would more than suffice for this project.

here are some resources we checked out when looking for basic sequencer ideas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TLhWLz-tD4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUR_pfyeZgo

here is some code we looked at - here is some other code we looked at.

After looking at some examples, both via YouTube videos and Arduino, we decided to essentially blend the ideas we discovered in an original way. However, it’s one thing to have nice implementational ideas, and a completely different thing to be able to execute on them, both on the hardware and software fronts. In order to actually do any of this stuff, we’d have to delve deep into the guts of our instruments and attempt to understand what made them tick.