A Tangible Sequencing Instrument
When I was a child I had access to all sorts of musical instruments – some of them were very hard to understand. The piano was a mystery to me for a very long time until I got to see one of them opened up and tuned by a professional. On the other hand, drums were very straightforward and even the snare drum was easy to deconstruct as a sum of all of its parts. Still, there were other musical instruments that I had experienced where I could not understand exactly how they work – even more, I could not figure out how a person could even think to build such a machine. [embed width="656"]http://youtu.be/GcHN8h6XP98[/embed] The music box was one of the biggest mysteries to me. It was wound up with spring, and on its playback it would play music with perfect tone and perfect timing. It used a wheel that simply scrolled around in a big circle, hitting tuned piece of metal like a flat toothed comb. Today we consider something like this a piece of history, but that same concept can be used with digital technology. This time it uses optical sensors and feedback to a computer to create those notes digitally. http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2013/05/19/teeter-tangible-sequencing-instrument/