Golan Levin’s performance last Friday at the Kabuki on his super cool musical instrument / physical interface Scrapple was so intriguing that I had to dig up more info on it (and some other related projects too!) One of the things I noticed after the performance was a scrap of paper by his table which was a musical score he had scribbled before the show (and which he didn’t actually follow very faithfully but I still wish I’d taken a photo of!) I do remember however, that the first two frames looked something like this.

What was interesting to me was that inspite of my total inability to sight-read traditional music (a source of frustration when I was taking piano lessons way back when), I could sort of hear in my head what kind of sounds his scribbles and shapes might produce. Maybe because the system was so literal – it was fairly simple and worked somewhat like this

There are dots and rectangles in the sketch above but any physical object or shape could be thrown or drawn on the table (a simple whiteboard) to produce a sound! I sort of lamented not having taken any photos of the thing afterwards. Luckily, he has a paper online on how it all works.

In the process of digging up information on this, I also found some other projects that look to be pretty neat.

• reacTIVision “an open source, cross-platform computer vision framework for the fast and robust tracking of fiducial markers in a real-time video stream.” It doesn’t seem quite as elegant as Scrapple, but it’s open source!
• sonicforms another open source “research platform for developing tangible interfaces for audio visual environments.” Not a whole lot there yet, but it looks like it could be a good resource if it gets off the ground.
• A list of other tangible musical interfaces / music tables

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