Hasta La Ideas

Recently, students from Keio University’s Graduate School of Media Design transformed a garden of greenery into a multi-player musical instruments. Primarily a party game, the Sound Garden is an interesting non-formal interface that connects technology and nature for participants. It is delightful in its seeming simplicity, easily engaging up to 12 people inviting collaboration on an impromptu musical jam session.

The brief was straight-forward: create an entertaining social interaction for participants of TEDxTokyo. As Jack Shaw, project manager and Masters Student at Keio shared, “It was important to meet their need of a social entertainment experience for the breaks between speakers, and to get far away from any notion of a sterile traditional conference environment.”

Using an Adobe Flash demo and a paper mockup with colored circles standing in for living plants, the team built their first ‘dirty’ prototype. If a user touched a color circle, the tester would initiate a looped sound until the same circle was touched again. Two or more users would work together, turning on and off sounds to create a musical composition.

They then began working on a series of prototypes using living plants and Arduino to attach the game’s functions to living plants. Working with programmer Yuki Anai, Shaw explained the innerworkings of Sound Gardening:

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