Hack #1

For my Hack #1, I used the Makey Makey to challenge the inherent functions and uses of musical instruments. As a society, we are taught that many objects, especially instruments, have a sole function and purpose, and that they should only be used in that specific way. Chairs are meant for sitting, wheels are meant for turning, and clothes are meant for wearing. In reality, however, many use chairs to reach dead light bulbs, many swing from tires hung by rope, and many (well maybe not many) attend nude beaches. While countless other objects have been used in unconventional, unintended ways, musical instruments, on the other hand, are almost always used as expected. While musicians and their instruments tend to have symbiotic relationships, giving personality and vitality to their sonic productions, there seems to be only one way an instrument can be played. A piano’s keys must be pressed, a guitar’s strings must be plucked, and a snare drum must be struck. As a result, musical instruments have quite a low cognitive friction, a concept coined by researcher Alan Cooper. He describes in his work, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (2004), that cognitive friction is “the resistance encountered by a human intellect when it engages with a complex system of rules that change as the problem changes” (Cooper 2004, 19). Essentially, Cooper understands that designers and developers “should create objects that ease tasks for their users and also ease the relations between objects and users” (Sicart 93). The ideal object has a use or a function that is easy to understand by its users, which is precisely why musical instruments have such a low cognitive friction. Anyone can intuitively understand that to play a piano means to press its keys. With all this being said, my Makey Makey Hack uses a guitar and a bass to produce sounds from instruments that are wildly different from a guitar or a bass. I have mapped the Makey Makey so that when a guitar string is plucked (or simply touched), a piano chord will play. Similarly, when a bass string is plucked (or simply touched), a drum kick will play. With these new connections and mappings, the user can play the piano and drums by playing the guitar and bass, exhibiting a playful and insightful look into what instruments and their native sounds actually mean. I was primarily inspired by our divergent thinking activity on our very first day of class as it made me wonder how “incorrectly” someone can play an instrument (much like how “incorrectly” someone can use a brick). Indeed, there are savants who can play the drums, bass, and melody on a single guitar, but I’ve never heard of anyone who can play the trumpet on a piano.