What could be better than music and candy coming together to form one glorious gadget and symbolize youth, peace and happiness?

Well, a lot of things (and I do acknowledge that the latter half of that sentence was weird), but this still ranks high up there on my list. It’s true, this sequencer uses bubblegum as its markers. Here’s how it works:

A grid of holes, consisting of several rows with 16 holes each is the canvas. On it, you arrange colored gumballs. The 16 columns represent the 16th-notes in a measure. Each color is mapped to a specific sample.

The Bubblegum Sequencer senses the position of the balls through a video camera mounted underneath the surface. The captured image is processed by a computer vision routine that computes the average color in each hole. The colors are quantized and mapped to notes. For each note, a MIDI event is generated and sent to the operating system’s MIDI bus.

Well that’s probably a bunch of jibberish to many, so basically it’s a gadget that uses the gumball colors to determine which “sound” to play. Okay because I’m lazy to explain more, I’ll just show you the video.

The pros: It’s fun! Come on, bubblegum and music, how can you go wrong? After playing, you and some friends can pop those candies into your mouths, completing the gumball experience.

The cons: The gumballs are food, so you’ll have to replace them every once in a while, that is if you don’t want them to go to waste. They could’ve used marbles… but then again. Bubblegum. Fun.

Technorati tags: bubblegum, sequencer, music, gum, beat, tempo, melody, cute gadget, food, candy, midi

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 2:21 am and is filed under Mindless Fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.