BONNIE:  All right.  Hi, everyone.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Hi!
AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Hello!
BONNIE:  I'm going to talk to you about music programming and 
arduino at me all the exclamation points, also known as building 
electronic interfaces to create awesome.  So before we begin, a 
little bit about myself.  Hi, I'm Bonnie, you can find me on the 
interwebs there.  I'm a software engineer at Codecademy.  And so 
I work in software in my day job, but I have a bit of a hardware 
habit.  I started arduino in 2013, and then I started music 
about a year ago and I find this stuff really cool and really 
fun.  So I like building electronic musical instruments.  As I 
say that, people are usually not along with me.  And they 
usually look at me funny because we're used to two of the 
phrases in here but usually not all of them together, right?  
Everyone has an idea of what electronic music is, yeah, we all 
have an idea of what musical instruments are, whether that's the 
violin, the drums, the human voice, we all have an idea of what 
musical instruments are, or should be.  But we usually don't see 
them put together, and part of that is the way of creating 
electronic music right now, a lot of people the way that they 
perform it, interact with it is through interfaces like with 
buttons and sliders, and knobs and all this stuff that's weirdly 
unexpressive.  And I find that very strange because electronic 
music, right, like you're literally shaping sound out of 
nothing.  You have this huge huge range of things that you can 
produce.  And yet, we don't usually get the same expressive 
interface that you get from a normal musical instrument. -- 
"normal," right?  So I like building electronic musical 
instruments.  I'm going to show you some two quick videos of 
some of mine.  I did not do the live demo route because the live 
demo gods do not always smile upon me.  So here's one.  This is 
called, "Love Music."
          Yeah!
[ Applause ]
Thanks.  So as you can see, that one uses what I think is a 
pretty natural gesture right:  Touching the water.  And you get 
sound.  And there's no magic there.  This is safe.  And that's 
doing touch sensing.  This is another one.  This is my lumiphone 
and this is a light based one.  Also stolen from a coffee house. 
 Okay.  I'm going to stop there.  So, this one is, you know, it 
uses light and it lets you control pitch, volume, and vibrato 
based on how you wave your hands to the air.  So you can 
literally reach out and grab the sound and move it around, 
right?  So with both of these projects I've had some fun leaving 
them in public places and watching people interact with them.  I 
left this on a cafeteria table and just saw what people did, 
which was great and I've also posted some videos on YouTube and 
got some great reactions.  This is something that I kind of want 
to frame up on my wall which is weird.  I could literally wave 
my hands over rocks to this music and make it look like I was 
playing ROCKS!  Which, as far as what YouTube comments, it was 
not what I was expecting.  So, when I build these kinds of 
things, I really like them because they get, partly because they 
get good reactions.  People react with excitement or disbelief.  
And, you know, I think it's kind of magical.
          If you're like me, maybe you like programming because 
you think it's kind of magical, right?  It's like, "I can make 
my computer do things."  That's definitely why I like 
programming.  And if that's true, I think hardware projects, at 
least for me, are doubly magical.  Because with these kinds of 
things, you're literally taking in the real world, like, calling 
it into your computer through sensors, doing something 
processing through it and then pushing sound back out.  And so 
you get this fun feedback loop where suddenly, like, yeah, the 
programming is really awesome, but then it, kind of, just 
disappears and suddenly I have this interaction where I'm just 
like literally waving my hands in the air, I could be playing 
rocks!  And, like, I really like that.  So I didn't get up here 
today, though, to say that makes me feel like a wizard.  I got 
up here to be like, "And you can do it too!" So ingredients in 
these spells.  Nursing home, arduino.  Raise your hand if you've 
heard of arduino before.  So arduino has been massively 
successful over the last few years.  The first being that it's 
affordable and this is huge for barrier of entry.  Your average 
arduino board costs between ten and $30 now and you can just get 
started.  The sensors that I used.  In that mug, that's $2 worth 
of sensors.  In the cup, that's $6 worth of sensors.  These are 
not -- you can actually afford to play with these.  They're 
great toys.  And the other two, which are super, super important 
and echo with some of the keynotes today is that it's 
accessible.  So the arduino community has put so much effort in 
making these things approachable.  You don't need electrical 
experience.  You don't even really need programming experience.  
When I do workshops, we've taken people with zero knowledge and 
gotten them to the blinking lights stage at the end, which is 
great.  So arduino, it's wonderful.  And what it does, it's a 
physical computing platform so it lets you deal with input and 
output, right, in the real world.  And so you have all these 
sensors for musical instruments.  This is of course, super 
important.  You want to build an interface.  So you've got 
light, touch, water, GPS, motion, lots of stuff.  And I included 
this gif because, you know, kind of feels like you too, can 
master the four elements.  Except I guess instead of bringing 
balance to the world or making music, or whatever -- minor 
details.  So that's great.  And then the second one, and this is 
one that I think far fewer people will have heard of.  Raise 
your hand if you've heard of ChucK.  Oh, yay.  That's exciting.  
So ChucK is a musical programming language and it was developed 
at Princeton and it's designed for use by musicians and that 
means, like, the primitive things that you work with in ChucK 
relate to things like time and sound and so you can get started 
making things pretty quickly.  It's free.  And it's 
cross-platform.  And it's not some fancy software that you're 
going to pay money for.  So making sound in ChucK is pretty 
simple.  This is "hello world."  Yeah, you have to start the 
virtual machine yourself.  That's kind of weird.  Sorry about 
that.  That was kind of loud.  So yeah, this is all it takes to 
get started with ChucK.  You say I have a sine wave, send it to 
my speakers and then wait one second.  That's what you will that 
says.  And then if you want to do something like input.  I'll do 
something with 440 unless anyone objects.  Yeah, and then I can 
mess around with this, right?  So we all know frequency, 
doubling make octaves happen.  Yay!  So that's, like, ChucK 
very, very briefly.  I really like ChucK because the fact that 
it's so easy to now program sound means that you can just like 
use whatever parameters you want, right?  We're programmers, we 
know how to take things and make them do other things.  So how 
do you combine these?  Music, and programming, and arduino 
somehow work together?  It's actually more straightforward than 
you might think.  So we take a sensor, in this case a light 
sensor, it costs a dollar.  Plug it into an arduino board, and 
now it gives you a value.  Let's say, zero through 100.  Now 
you've got the state of it, what do you do with it?  Well, you 
can literally if you're lazy like me, you can take an USB cable 
and plug your arduino into your computer and send it over serial 
and it turns out that that's really, really straightforward and 
easy and cheap.  I like the combination of these things.  And 
then you can just process the data in ChucK, right?  And then 
again that means that you can make it do whatever you want.
          I'm obviously handwaving a lot of stuff away here.  If 
you want to try making this stuff and see what actually goes 
into it, and want to confirm for yourself that I'm not, like, 
telling lies... these are three of my projects including the 
first two, the ones that I showed off on YouTube.
          I also think they retweeted the slide deck so you can 
get that later.  And I have all the code, I have all the circuit 
diagrams if you build them yourself.  Piano stairs are something 
that I didn't show off but they're a really good beginner 
project.  So go make things.  And I'm going to end on this great 
meme, anything is possible if you use your imagination.  Because 
the cool thing about providing these ingredients is that 
anything is possible.  Like the lumiphone that you could control 
like this, you could use it for vibrato for music.  Or shadow, 
so you make a piano key.  You could also, like, imitate the 
Apple watch and, like, stick one on a wristband, right, and get 
a really poor man's pulse sensor, and get one that changes a 
piece of music with how agitated the user is with a sensor that 
costs a dollar.  And there's a lot more that you can do.  So 
literally, the barrier of entry keeps falling and it's gotten to 
the point where you can just mix and match these things and come 
up with wacky stuff.  So on that note, thank you.