Andrew Turley writes to share his microfiche-to-MIDI music maker, which he shared at the Maker Faire. The idea: take the humble library microfiche, and translate light and dark values into MIDI, fed to a Casio keyboard. Sound like a random idea? Well, it would be — except Andrew happens to be in a band called Microfiche. (Check them out on MySpace.) None other than IEEE Spectrum — yes, from the IEEE standards body that brings us stuff like FireWire (aka IEEE 1394) — got hands-on with his project; IEEE Spectrum’s Josh Romero named it one of his favorite musical projects at the faire.
Maker Faire Highlights: Making Music the Hard Way [IEEE Spectrum]
Andrew has more impressions of the Faire on his blog Pillowsopher:
I’ve been there for the last two days presenting some of my projects, such as:
- Unicorn Vs. Dolphin
- my stomp pad
- $2 multitouch instrument (based on the water-in-a-bag design by Erling Ellingsen)
- Rock Band Keynote
- the Microfiche Machine (light to MIDI converter for the band Microfiche)
- the LED VU Meter
Cool, but I’d love to do this with microfilm — especially with the film cranked up to full speed. Wheeeee— click, click … crap. Film came off the spool. (What, am I the only person who’s done old-fashioned library research?)
More Maker Faire Videos
Make: Blog’s resident musicologist Collin Cunningham has a video with more of the music projects at Maker Faire:
Musical interfaces @ Maker Faire from Collin Cunningham on Vimeo.
Anyone else with fun Maker Faire reports, do send them our way. Sorry I couldn’t make it this year — but I’ll take this opportunity to finally edit all this footage I have from Yuri’s Night Bay Area, for more Greater San Francisco DIY Musical Goodness!