MaKey MaKey Musical Construction Kit: Update

Since the research group began this summer, the MaKey MaKey Musical Construction Kit has come a long way. The Summer Music Education Research Group started with nothing but an idea, and now at the end of the summer have a working product and resources that the public can use to create the kit.

Initially the concept was created for a single tool to be used incorporating the MaKey MaKey, a custom Arduino developed by graduate students at MIT, and Scratch, an online programming environment (click here to see one of the group's Scratch studios, links to other studios on this page). Starting in June, the Summer Music Education Research Group worked to develop this one tool that is now one of the three tools that the group has created blueprints for using the kit.

The MaKey MaKey Chord Board, the original tool created using
the MaKey MaKey Musical Construction Kit, click the picture to learn more

With this tool, the Summer Music Education Research Group went to the Music Education Hackathon in New York City on June 28 and 29 to compete against amateur and professional developers for prizes including web hosting, development time, and cash. The event, hosted by Spotify, was designed to draw in hackers to create tools for music educators in a competitive setting. Developers came from all over the country to compete. Over the course of twenty-four hours, the MaKey MaKey Chord Board evolved from a single tool to a component something much greater: a set of musical building blocks with resources accessible enough for anyone to use and the versatility to create nearly any tool with these resources.

With a revamped concept and a new product to pitch, the Summer Music Education Research Group presented their MaKey MaKey Musical Construction Kit to the panel of judges. The judges loved the concept, and out of over forty projects entered in the competition, the MaKey MaKey Musical Construction Kit took second place overall. The second place win was unexpected by the students (the product that they created did not include any of the sponsored API that the Hackathon was promoting) but a huge confidence boost for the group. The prize included $2,000 in Amazon Web Services credit and twenty-five hours of development help from the NYC Dev Shop.

With this success, the Summer Music Education Research group rapidly began developing more tools that can be created with the MaKey MaKey Musical Construction Kit. Throughout July, the research group created two more tools with the construction kit and chronicled their progress on their blog. In addition to the MaKey MaKey Chord Board, there is now a tool called the MaKey MaKey Portable Chorus and another called the MaKey MaKey Multipurpose Kalimba that can all be created using the same set of materials found in the MaKey MaKey Musical Construction Kit.

MaKey MaKey Portable Chorus

MaKey MaKey Multipurpose Kalimba

The group hopes to continue work on the MaKey MaKey Musical Construction Kit for as long as they can. One hope is that the kit will become a marketable product that can be sold to music teachers. The group hopes to work with the Difference Maker program at UMass Lowell to continue exploring the entrepreneurial opportunities associated with the kit. Another is to keep developing tools for the kit for people to access and remix on their own. The ultimate goal with the MaKey MaKey Musical Construction Kit is to create a cost-effective accessible tool that music teachers and students can use to create and learn as a community.

Update: Music MaKey

On Friday, July 5 I (Alex) spent the day with Eric Rosenbaum at the MIT Media Lab. We made some progress on the Music MaKey...

Eric's original prototype idea

 Above was Eric's first prototype idea, an idea similar to what we were also considering. The thinking was to provide more inputs and include a design that mirrored 2 octaves of a piano keyboard and a drum kit.

To get started, we simplified the keyboard layout to one octave and went to the FabLab to use the vinyl cutter to cut a copper foil template.

3rd times the charm (top) on the vinyl cutter

As you can see, we tried 3 times before we got a good cut. For the first try, the knife pressure (set to 50gf) was too light and it did not cut through the foil. The 2nd try with a setting of 130gf was too hard and tore the foil. We settled on a final cut pressure of 80gf and the top cut was the result.

Carefully transferring to side of MaKey box

Though masking tape was recommended as the transfer tape, we didn't have any nearby and instead used gaffers tape to transfer the foil cut out from the original tape to a cardboard side of a MaKey MaKey box.  This is a very careful process of finding a tape with an adhesive strong enough to lift the foil cutouts from foil, but weak enough to transfer the foil onto the prototype surface, in this case cardboard.

Successful test with Teensy2.0++ - Sending MIDI to GarageBand

Above is our first test clipping leads on the copper foil interface prototype onto Eric's Teensy2.0++ running custom MIDI code. Just like the MaKey MaKey a 22MOhm resistor is added between power (+5V from the USB cable) and the input pin. It worked! We were successfully able to trigger MIDI notes on and off in GarageBand, as well as send Control Change messages.

Once that worked, we tried creating a graphite potentiometer testing analog input to the Music MaKey prototype. 

Bottom right corner - graphite potentiometer prototype.

This test did not go so well. We tried mapping the resistance values to the MIDI pan control change message (10). There was simply too much "noise" on the ports and in the reading to be accurate. We'll have to think more about this, because we would like to also have analog inputs for the Music MaKey.

Possible alternative layout for a Music MIDI MaKey

After trying the above tests, we started discussing an alternative layout with the two octaves of the virtual keyboard's on Music MaKey mirrored. This would enable a more compact layout and possibly make it easier for users to connect two octaves worth of alligator clips. Alternative, it introduces the possibility to an embedded feature of splitting the keyboards onto different channels and sounds. That adds additional complexity to the design and user interface, so we may not keep that for the default firmware build.

We also moved ground connections to the sides and added 3 general purpose pin connections in the middle. By default, these might be initially mapped to sustain, octave + and octave -.

Next steps:

• Investigate ways of smoothing the analog input sensing for variable, homemade resistors.
• Mock up a design in Eagle and build an actual PCB prototype; begin first user tests.
• Decide on initial keyboard mode computer key mapping. Home row one octave mapping (GarageBand) vs. full two octave keyboard mapping (JamWithChrome.com).
• Design custom, cross-platform web audio API app for keyboard mode use?
• Prototype a custom remixing/visualization app based on remix.js from EchoNest.

Congrats on 2nd prize!

I'll use this post to collect and document the links, press and images around the Music Ed Hack event in NYC.

Links:

• MaKey MaKey Chord Board project submission
• Music Ed Hack
• Music Ed Hack Hacks
• Alex's favorite Music Ed Hack hacks
• Hack Days as a Model for Musical Innovation?
• The Human-Centered Design Process behind Music Ed Hack
• A report on HAMR, the other music hack event from that weekend
• Press - edSurge.com report on Music Ed Hack 2013

A video of Graham and Matt being awarded 2nd Prize.