Just thought we'd share some more work by Eric Rosenbaum and Alex Ruthmann at MusEd Labs, two NYU researchers that have been playing with their Squink for the past few weeks. Last week Eric shared some designs of a floral design that he originally called 'sweetchild o' mine', which one could sweep one's finger in a circle to trigger different samples (of the Guns 'n Roses song) with a MaKey MaKey.
The creation process was very hands-on. In an email Eric explained the process like this. "The way I made the layout was by sketching it in pencil, tracing it with a sharpie, taking a picture, importing into illustrator, converting it to vector art, and editing it (to e.g. make sure the traces have 0.1" spacing to match the header). the rough bits came from the sharpie. :)" In the first iterations Eric discovered that there were distortions in the printed image, which were triggered by placing the print to far to the right and causing the printhead to accidently trigger the endstop to early. Users note this! "This was mostly for fun," he noted, "but it's really part of a larger exploration of interactive musical drawings and paintings. I'd love to be able to print much larger, more complex ones like this stuff."
As you can see in the above video, the pedals trigger each sample quite nicely. We were worried that the constant motion of one's finger would damage the conductive ink - so far it seems to be alright. The debate now is how to ensure 100% durable inks that may last interaction with a 5 year old child as a part of an interactive kid's book, or perhaps for those older adults still trying to nail down GnR riffs.
