Title: Garage Orchestra

Short Summary:

The product is a position sensing baton that “activates” when pointed at mockups of various musical instruments. The mockups will have LEDs that light up when you point at them and play music.

The goal of this project is to empower children to be orchestra conductors (for a few minutes). The child would be handed a conductor’s baton. Unbeknownst to them, this baton would have some sensing it that would be able to “play” when pointed at certain musical instruments. There may be an initial learning curve for the child if he does not know what a conductor does. However, he will quickly understand that if he points his magical stick at one of the instruments, then music plays. This project will be designed to appeal to the child’s autonomy and industry. In the beginning there may some exploration done by the child, however, he would have to do this on his own.

In the beginning there will be this magical moment when they first point the baton at one of the instruments and then hears music being produced. Once the child understands this causal relationship, I suspect that he may try and test the system by darting rapidly back and forth instruments to produce sound. However, after a while, (hopefully), the child may get tired of producing random sounds and instead try to play actual music. This would appeal to the child’s innate sense of industry. If he can produce even the simplest of melodies, it will give the child a sense of pride and accomplishment.

There will be two modes of operation, the first will involve will the free music as described above. The second will be a more guided mode. The LED’s would light up and the you would have to point the baton at the instrument. If you do it in the right order, then, Vivaldi’s summer concerto will play.

The hallmark of success would be having the child create some sort of simple melody with the instruments available to them.

Technical Outline

This will most likely involve a raspberry pi and an Arduino working in tandem. The raspberry pi will play the music. An accelerometer will get the orientation of the baton and there will be an ir led on the tip of the baton. The instruments will all have multiple ir sensors on its body to detect being pointed at. The instruments will be laser cut (they will be 2 dimensional). They will be pasted on some sort of board. with sensors on them. The key technical challenge will be to detect when an instrument is being pointed at. I think just an accelerometer should be enough, but I believe that this will take significant testing to be sure.

Project management

The on site tests will have two objectives, the first will be test the functionality and the second to test the durability of the product. The first thing that needs to be done, is that we need a proof of concept for the sensors. It will make or break this project

The project timeline is here

The budget outline is here