Musical Internet of Things

Musical instruments seem like an ideal class of objects to connect to the internet. Unstructured brainstorming and linking here.

Instruments

  • Often have built in sensors (pick-ups, transducers, knobs, tuners)
  • Often have built in power supplies (9v batteries) or access to power (e.g. phantom power)
  • Electric/electronic instruments even more so, acoustic instruments have benefit of lots of open space inside
  • Complex emotional and working relationships between instrument and player
  • Used in many different contexts, often travel around a lot

Use Cases

  • Constant recording of audio so no genius noodling is ever lost and forgotten
  • Multi-instrument performing: add accelerometers, instruments know when they’ve been picked up/put down, IoT–connected mixer can mute automatically.
  • Quantified Self-style analytics: amount of time spent playing, volume levels, etc. Lots of potential pretty-graph material
  • Meta-music: algorithmically generate music using non-audio data generated by musical instruments

Hardware, Software

  • Smallest Federated Wiki
  • Raspberry Pi