Melomuse – Will G.’s Senior Project (Sneak Peek)

At the Ross School, Senior Projects are a big deal. Will is one of the students that we’ve been helping to mentor and he has been working on creating an interactive musical sequencer / MIDI gallery installation for his Senior Project.

Will has been tinkering with a couple of different ways to accomplish his idea. The first one used a SparkFun 4X4 buttons and PCB which had great buttons and beautiful colors… but the number of pins it took was a real challenge.

His most recent version is based on Adafruit’s Trellis platform. After testing a single Trellis board, he fell in love with the system and jumped on the “Hella Untz” which after assembled only takes 4 pins on a Leonardo. Here’s the assembled version and he’s really excited:

A big Step

His final project archive will be posted here: http://seniorproject.ross.org/2015/wgreenberg15/

Arduino Controlled Piano

Abstract:
Using an older Yamaha Disklavier grand piano that has an outdated floppy disk driven interface, we added a Sparkfun MIDI shield to an Arduino to drive the piano. The laptop is connected to the Arduino in the video only to supply power to the microcontroller.

The video shows a program Dr. Morgan wrote that generates a random but vaguely-musical-sounding melody.

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