In 72 Hours, These Hackers Invented Bizarre New Ways to Interact With Music

What does it take to build a musical instrument? Perfect pitch? Perhaps a musician or two?

The maker community doesn’t think so. Last weekend, Red Bull held its third annual Creation competition, where some of the country’s top DIY hackers compete to build epic junkyard projects in a nonstop 3-day whirlwind. With the latest, the “Signal to Noise” music themed competition, six teams of makers with virtually no musical background built insane DIY instruments in just 72 hours.

Most weren't conventional music-making devices; in fact, the most interesting were hardly instruments at all—they were technologies designed to change the way we experience pre-recorded sounds. Of all the projects, two stuck out the most to me as larger-than-life instruments built for anyone to play.

First up is the North Street Labs’ Treequencer, which turns music into a playful, ethereal performance of motion and light—all wrapped in an impressive metal tree. All you have to do to play it is wave your hand around the upper section of the tree.

The Treequencer can quite literally see motion the of your hand as it’s fitted with an array of Doppler and ultrasonic sensors. The metallic oak uses these sensors to determine the motion, speed, and distance of your hands to play notes with different tones as well as frequencies. It’s an incredibly cool project that turns motion into sound.

If you’re imagining a group of forest children prancing around a singing tree, you’re really not too far off from reality.

The sound pumps though a huge monitor speaker hidden inside a metal birdhouse that lights up thanks to four 900 lumen red LEDs. Look closely and you might also notice a couple of understated flourishes on the Treequencer’s branches including a 3D printed owl as well as the small nest towards the right.

Steven Shaffer of North Street Labs didn’t hold anything back when he told me virtually none of the makers in the competition were musicians at all.

“It was a tough competition because all of the teams were like ‘we don’t know music,’” Shaffer quipped. “We’re all computer geeks, engineers—none of us are musicians but I think everyone pulled off an amazing interpretation of the topic.”

Rather than focusing on creating a completely new instrument, the North Street Labs team wanted to build something fun for anyone to quite literally jump into to generate sound.

One of the biggest challenges for Shaffer, on top of being partially deaf, was finding a way to test their musical tree a couple of yards away from a blaring concert. (The contest is held in the space adjacent to the Northside Festival’s central music stage, where the likes of Walkmen and Solange were playing.) So Steven set himself up in hotel room with a bunch of speakers and sensors taped to the wall just so he could program and test the music for the build away from the noise. When they transferred the parts back to the build, however, the team couldn’t hear anything over the concert.

“You know the first violin probably sounded like shit,” Shaffer joked. “It took years for someone to perfect that before any musician touched it.” Still, Shaffer was extremely pleased with the crack programing that he completed in just a few days of learning how to program with MIDI for the first time ever.

The Maker Twins team also had a similar “just roll with it” attitude, and possessed a near-complete lack of musical experience. Instead of looking to blaze a trail with an entirely new sounding instrument, they also created a digital music player that focused on changing the way you interact with music.

Enter the Vitruvian. Designed as one massive ring, large enough for a person to walk through, it turns music into a full body experience. It’s sort of like a one-band machine except instead of wearing an accordion over your chest while cymbals are clashing behind you; you’re operating this huge contraption with bicycle wheels all over the place.

The simple rundown on firing up the Vitruvian is flicking the levers on the top left will start you off with a simple dubstep or techno track. After that you can throw the other switch to activate four different bass tracks and melodies. The one wheel emblazoned with the Vitruvian man on the very top simply controls the tempo. Meanwhile rest of the bicycle wheels trigger other effects like pitch bends, shifts, and the different frequency bands. It’s basically a synthesizer you can walk into.

On the more technical side though, each wheel is equipped with a homebrewed encoder that fires an infrared beam to detect any motion on the wheels. The motion is recorded to an Arduino that signals two MIDI controllers to mess around with the music.

The idea behind Vitruvian came out as a sort of visualization of music through the “circle of fifths” and Lenoardo da Vinci’s drawing of the vitruvian man spread out on a wheel. Using these to basic concepts as their starting point, the Maker Twins wanted to create a simple instrument that anyone could pick up in 10 seconds.

Pat Murray, one of the Maker Twins’ actual twins along with his brother Mike, admits Vitruvian was designed a bit like auto-tuned singing, so that anyone can pick it up and “not look like a complete hack.”

“Vitruvian is really user friendly in one sense because it’s hard to screw it up but it’s also hard to tell your actually controlling anything, Murray shared. “Right now, when you switch something it does not do it right away, unless you’re doing it on the downbeat.”

Although anyone can start playing Vitruvian, it was also made to be like a real instrument that you could figure out after playing and listening for a while to compose some real pieces of music.

While these instruments might seem completely impractical, it’s important to remember that they’re all life-sized creations that were whipped together in just 72 hours—and some with a very basic understanding of how to create or program for music. It’s also interesting that the most successful teams focused on ways to use tech to help listeners interact with music, as opposed to creating new sounds; fitting, perhaps, in this age of remixes and aural retroactivity.

Who knows what would happen if they just had a little more time or knowhow to develop better sound instruments?

We could have the next synthesizer or keytar on our hands. Or the next Theramin.