LCL - 2014 04 15 - (3) Tinkering with MaKey MaKey & Music

Eric Rosenbaum introduces MaKey MaKey and shares how he inspires others to tinker.

Since the topic this week is Play,

both of us thought the natural person
to involve was Eric Rosenbaum

one of the graduate students
in our Lifelong Kindergarten group

who I think has been one of the most
playful graduate students and researchers

that we have here at the Media Lab.

So that would be great to talk to
Eric about ideas of play and tinkering

In fact, we wrote a paper together
about designing for tinkerability.

How we can design things to help
other people tinker.

I think one thing that I've always been
impressed with you is

both your thinking about
how to help other people tinker,

but you have a tinkering spirit yourself.

So I think it will be great to hear about
some of your activities about

your own tinkering and also the way that
you've supported other people tinkering.

So I thought we might start with having you
talk about the MaKey MaKey project

that you worked on with Jay Silver.

So you can tell about that.

Absolutely.

This is the MaKey MaKey invention kit.

It's an invention kit for everyone and
rather than trying to explain it

I'm just going to show you, quickly,
what we can make it do.

Here's the MaKey MaKey circuit board.

It's a little, printed circuit board with
a micro-controller on there

that it pretends it's a keyboard.

So it's a USB device ...Where is my USB cable?

Ah, there it is.

That I plug-in to the computer.

Just like so.

Then when I plug-in the MaKey MaKey

the computer thinks that I've plugged-in
a keyboard, like to type on.

But I get to make my own keys

and sometimes you get to make keys
out of your academic advisors.

So for example,

I can take one of these alligator clips

that also comes with the kit.

I'll take this blue one

and plug it into on the MaKey MaKey
where it says space.

It also has up, down, left and right,
and click and

so it can pretend to be the up,
down, left and right arrow keys

or the space bar or the mouse click.

So I'm plugging it into space and

now I can make something
that replaces the space bar.

I have this webpage open,
makeymakey.com/bongos,

which does this when I press
the space bar.

Makes a sound.

So now I can replace that actual space bar

with something that I connect
these alligator clips to.

So first of all, I need to connect
this white one

to the bottom of the MaKey MaKey
where it says earth or ground.

Then I complete a circuit
between those two things

by touching them to each other and
that makes the sound.

But I can complete a circuit

because of the way MaKey MaKey works

through anything that conducts
even a little bit of electricity.

Fortunately we know that both
Mitch and Natalie conduct electricity.

So if I hand this blue one to Mitch

and now I'll ask him to hold up his other hand.

now I'll connect myself to ground and
we can complete the circuit by high-fiving.

Now we can add Natalie in

She's gonna be, let's see,
this drum has a left arrow on it.

So plug that in to the left arrow
on the MaKey MaKey

and then if she just holds
the middle tip of it between her fingers

and holds up another hand,
now I have an instrument

made of two people.

So that's a quick intro to
how the MaKey MaKey works.

Maybe you can say a little bit

After you started working on this and
put it out to the world

People started using it in all sorts of ways.

Probably in a lot of ways you've never imagined

Maybe talk about some of the experience about

other people ended up using MaKey MaKey.

It's been incredibly exciting
to see the variety of things

that people have been able to deal with it.

When we first created it, Jay and I
made a few examples ourselves

at his house in the woods.

So we filmed ourselves,

playing dance dance revolution
by jumping in buckets of water

and making a controller
out of play dough and so forth.

So maybe we should see
some of those examples?

Sure.

So MaKey MaKey is about making
anything into a key.

Why use your boring old space bar

when you can plug-in a banana
and make a banana space bar?

For Super Mario Brothers, you can play with
the arrow keys and the space bar

or take some play dough, put it onto a notepad,

plug that into the MaKey MaKey,

and now you've got your own homemade,
slightly squishy, game control.

It really works.

When we play Pacman, we can replace the arrow
keys with this drawing.

It's just made of regular pencil and regular
paper, plug it into the MaKey MaKey, and now

you can play by touching your drawing.

Why are we filling these buckets with water?

Of course in order to play dance dance revolution.

It's somewhat harder to play
in this way but it's refreshing.

Here we're making piano stairs that allow
us to trigger notes with our bare feet.

Everyone's favorite, the banana piano.

The human synthesizer,
it works with babies.

And when the cat sits on the foil

as soon as it drinks from the water that completes the circuit,

triggering photo booth
to take a cat selfie.

Those are some great examples
that you and Jay worked on.

I know you've been facilitating
a lot of workshops

to support other people tinkering
with MaKey MaKey.

Yeah, I did a very exciting workshop over
the course of five days in Holland

with some undergraduate students

and here is some videos
of the projects that we had by the end.

So the chord fingers allow this student to
accompany himself

as he sang a famous Leonard Cohen song

where each finger triggers a different
chord as he touches a ladder.

The balloons, when they touch the foil on
the ceiling, each trigger a different note.

The balloons had conductive paint on them

and they used conductive thread
to connect it to the MaKey MaKey.

Here she's sewn some conductive thread

into her fur jacket to make
ambient fur sounds.

And of course the mini drums
made using the MaKey MaKey box

and some foil, play dough, and paper.

Each finger of the organ
gloves trigger different sounds

and then here is a duet
between those two projects.

How do you set up?

I mean I've seen you do it
but can you talk more about

how you encourage people
to tinker and play?

It's not like,
at the beginning you said

somebody make a balloon
on the ceiling ...Yeah.

Well, the very first thing
that we did as a group

in that workshop setting was

I had everyone in a big open room lie flat
on their backs on the floor

with their heads in the center forming a ring

and we played in improvisation game
called floor-head-hum

where everyone sings
a long steady note and

you get these emerging harmonies
that gradually shift and change.

It was a way for a group of people

who didn't know each other before

to find out that they could
do something together

and get comfortable
pushing their boundaries

and going right ahead and doing
something that was unexpected.

And they were kind of already playing and
tinkering with the sound together, right?

Exactly.

To be able to like pull down
their normal barriers

to just let them start imagining
and exploring in different ways.

They liked that so much that

we did that at the start of
each day of the five days.

But they also kind of tinkered with
the whole idea of that exercise

and made up a bunch of
different musical variations

on the floor-head-hum
singing game.

Like one where we sang short bursts of notes
that gradually ascended.

We called that the getty-head-hum,

a reference to the composer,
and a bunch of other variations.

So maybe you can say a little bit more about

the ways that you set up a workshop to help

other people feel like they can start tinkering.

One thing that I think it's
really important to do is

limit as much as possible
the lecture part.

So for example when
I'm introducing MaKey MaKey,

one thing that I have done sometimes

is instead of even explaining
how it works or how you might use it,

just kind of set it up for people to come

and poke around and try things out.

I'm there.

I might sort of wordlessly show a couple of
things and make it make a sound,

but then step back and
let other people poke around

and discover for themselves
how to make it work.

That feeling of having discovered yourself
how to make something work

rather than being told by
someone else is very valuable.

What about materials
and how you set those up?

So I think it's great to have
a wide variety of stuff in the room

even if they don't use all of it.

Just the sense of that wide array of possibilities,

of course you know I like to have
things like play dough, aluminum foil,

the brass brads that you connect
pieces of paper with,

lots of construction paper,
cardboard, sometimes food items.

You can use water and other liquids with
MaKey MaKey, that works great.

So just having as much of an array as possible
of different stuff

for people to poke around with
and try things out is super important.

Another thing that's useful for getting at
the sense of an open space of possibilities

is to show lots of examples.

Those can include things like

the videos we've been looking at
of examples that Jay and I have made

or that other people around
the world have made.

But I think it's also very important to have
those examples live in front of you

because people's sense of what's possible for them draws even more from

what they see in the room with them.

And what about how often do you give
a challenge versus make anything?

I've tried out different variations
on this question of

how much to sort of constrain it
versus keeping it wide open.

I think constraints can
actually be very generative.

If for example we constrained
a MaKey MaKey workshop

to the domain of making
musical instruments,

it's actually an opportunity
to try to push the boundaries.

I like to call it getting beyond the banana piano.

It's important for people to do
the first thing first

to make a row of objects that play a sequence of pitches

that are laid out kind of like a piano
and that all look the same.

Of course you can use different instrument
sounds, a different combination of notes,

a different spacial arrangement,
different objects,

but do the first thing first and then the question is

can we as facilitators help people imagine
the much larger space beyond that

and get to something inventive like put an musical instrument on the floor,

or making it so big that it has to be played by a whole bunch of people

or like maybe it's on your back, it's so tiny you have to play it with your pinky fingers.

or maybe it's made of something you play while you are eating it or,

I don't know it's a big space of possibilities.

That's good.

It's important to have those questions
at hand, not to tell people

"oh let's make a musical instrument
out of a couch now" but say

"what else around you could you use?"

"could you make instruments
out of the rolling chairs?"

and let people imagine
those possibilities themselves.

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