Description
Lucía Montesinos, Halfdan Hauch Jensen, Anders Sundnes Løvlie · IT University of Copenhagen · NIME 2025
Seven opal acrylic tubes, one per note of a heptatonic scale, each divided by strips of conductive tape into three touch zones for three octaves. Every tube holds an RGB LED. In chord-progression mode the light tells you where to go next: a tube glows pink for the coming chord, turns blue when touched, and the system advances. Several tubes can sound at once, so the instrument is polyphonic. The artifact is 75 cm wide and 110 cm tall, and you play it facing it, back to any audience.
The design brief was to let non-musicians make music without requiring skill, while still leaving them feeling it was theirs — deliberately ambiguous rather than instructive, so people would arrive at their own way of touching it. Trialled at a public event, and the paper catalogues what people actually did with their bodies: sliding up and down to find octaves, zigzagging, harp-like sweeps with both hands, stretching across the whole artifact to reach as many tubes as possible. One participant used their face.
images: Montesinos, Jensen & Løvlie, “Enabling Embodied Music-Making for Non-Musicians”, NIME 2025 (CC BY 4.0)