Meredith Silverman

Rosie and I have been up to no good this week, putting in extra hours in the lab and finishing our prototype. Our ideas came together well and we were able to present a working prototype. Although, in Rosie’s post, she puts working between quotes.

I’m very happy with the way the device turned out. It’s big, sturdy, and industrial-looking. It’s all metal and hot pink. But the sound it produces and the way one interacts with it could use some hot pink as well.

After our demonstration, Jamie suggested finding a way to make the sound continuous. Gideon observed that we had an interface but not an instrument. I think they may both be right. What we have now is — although it’s precisely what we planned to build — a whole lot of visual and not much auditory.

We might end up going in the Rube Goldberg/Pythagorus Switch direction they first imagined for us. I can see three possible scenarios:

• Add four musical landing pads in a circle around the base of the instrument. Construct these out of anything percussive — wood, metal, toys… Adapt a Twister spinner to control gameplay. For instance, one person spins and calls out: “Wooden balls xylophone!” and the other person has to obey.
• Get a whole bunch of hard, translucent tubes (of the hamster variety) and construct a 3D ball labyrinth, winding its way around the pole and toward the floor. Maybe incorporate the sorting mechanism into the instrument itself.
• Some wacky hybrid of the previous two ideas.

Rosie and I are both excited to keep working on Soundball. It’s a nice looking machine, and it’s already fun to play with. It can only get weirder, more complicated, and better.

Our assignment for the rest of the semester is a great big “free swim.” While I’m excited to revisit some of the stuff I’ve created for this class, I’ve got more doin’ in me first.

I was tempted to take the 2×2 metaphor to the extreme by creating animated GIFs the size of AIM buddy icons — 48×48 pixels. They’re tiny, and the stories they tell are barely stories at all. But I do think they qualify as 2×2s. We’ll see what the class has to say.

Feel free to use one as your buddy icon. Nothing would make me prouder.