Banana Piano Performances by Beau Silver and Amanda Palmer
Check out these two amazing performances on the MaKey MaKey banana piano, by Stanford graduate student Beau Silver, and musician Amanda Palmer!
Beau Silver is a brilliantly talented member of the MaKey MaKey team, and he also happens to be Jay's brother. Here's Beau playing an original composition on the bananas (note that his ankle is connected to "Earth" on the MaKey MaKey, freeing up both hands). Check out Beau's world-premiere performance on Bananamophone at the Stanford Computer Music Electromadness Concert Saturday, June 3rd @ 8pm.
Earlier this week Amanda Palmer visited us at the MIT Media Lab, where she hosted a webcast to give an update on her smashingly successful kickstarter campaign. Eric took the opportunity to show her the MaKey MaKey, and she and her friend Casey did a sweet improvisation on the bananas and limes, followed by some human synthesizer high-fives:
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Comments
Creator Jay Silver on June 3, 2012
@Jay M. Beau is an amazing musician.
Creator Jay Silver on June 3, 2012
@steve any fruit will work: oranges, melons, avocados, etc. etc. (unless is it 100% completely dried out, or unless it is covered in wax)
Creator Jay Melican on June 2, 2012
Beau is amazing...and that's without limes!
Creator steve on June 1, 2012
Cool and delicious either way.
Creator steve on June 1, 2012
Jay - is there something funky about the material properties of bananas that makes them work well with high resistance switching? Or do you just like bananas? Or both?
Creator Pierre Gewelt on June 1, 2012
Really nice !
Creator Jay Silver on June 1, 2012
Hi All,
For those of you interested in how I hooked up Makey Makey to MIDI, I thought I would give you a few different ways. It's all about hooking up keyboard presses to MIDI, and then having Makey Makey trigger keyboard presses. Here are a few examples:
1. Easiest - Most audio software programs like Reason, Logic, Garage Band, etc. have a 'keyboard' mode, where your computer keyboard can trigger MIDI notes.
2. Moderate - download a special keyboard-to-midi software like midi keys (for the mac) located here:
http://midikeys.en.softonic.com/mac
There are many other programs that do this easily as well.
3. Expert - write your own code that makes keyboard presses trigger MIDI notes! Eric Rosenbaum hacked this one together at Maker Fair in a language called 'processing'. He shared it with me, and it can be found here:
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~beau/bananamophone/Bananamophone.pde
I hooked this up to a vibraphone in Reason.
Thanks everyone for watching! Feel free to come to the concert at Stanford tomorrow.
-Beau