Alex McLean

Musicbox controller

For upcoming collaborations with musicbox maestro David Littler, and to explore data input to Tidal as part of my ODI residency, I wanted to use one of these paper tape-driven mechanical music boxes as a controller interface:

You can see from the photo that I have quite a messy kitchen. Also that I’ve screwed the musicbox onto a handmade box (laser cut at the ever-wondrous Access Space). The cable coming out of it leads to a webcam mounted inside the box, that is peeking up through a hole underneath the paper as it emerges from the music box. With a spot of hacked-together python opencv code, here is the view from the webcam and the notes it sees:

Now I just need to feed the notes into Tidal, and use them to feed into live coded patterns. Should be good enough for upcoming performances with David tonight at a semi-private “Digital Folk” event at Access Space and another tomorrow in London at the ODI lunchtime lecture.

By the way the music in the above was made by my Son and I clipping out holes more or less at random. The resulting tune has really grown on me, though!

UPDATE – first live coding experiment: