MICHAEL UNA: Hi everyone. I'm Michael Una. Welcome to Dorkbot. I think we're going to have a pretty good presentation today. I'm going to talk about a couple of things here but it mostly involves alternative musical interfaces.

First thing we're going to talk about very quickly because it's actually a really simple system is using a bicycle to control a kid's toy drum machine and a little Casio keyboard that's been set up as a step sequencer. You have a bicycle which your legs will use to produce forward motion which turns the bicycle wheel. It creates rotation which sends a series of magnets past a set of magnetic switches in a sequence as it rotates. You then sort of go through a fairly simple matrix of setting the switches to go off at either a quarter note or an eighth note. You have a series of switches that choose and listen to either the quarter note or the eighth note, which have been assigned either to a note value or a drum kit value in which that hits the tone generator of each of the devices. I have a couple of circuit bending points in there that have a built-in amplifier. It's [INDISCERNIBLE] and you hear it.

The end result is that --

[MICHAEL UNA PLAYING A NOTE]

All right, so if this is on, and...

[MICHAEL UNA PROCEEEDS TO BICYCLE AND MANIPULATES A FEW PARAMETERS]

...there we go. So it was dropped a couple of times in an [INDISCERNIBLE] but so you can hear the rotation of the wheel. Now I can get the drum machine moving with it.

[MICHAEL UNA SPINS BICYCLE WHEEL TO TRIGGER AUDIO]

And so the idea is I have both hooked up here, but so the idea is two people can have them on two bicycles side by side. One person can be the drum machine, the other person can be like the melody sequencer, and by riding in tandem together, you keep at the same tempo as long as your bicycle wheels are the right diameter I guess. And then you can sort of like have a ride, so let me re-patch this real quick and then we'' make some beats on the drum unit and --

So now that's a pretty simple idea. It's not that very complex. It's kind of like I just coupled together from a couple of kid's toys but there is something you don't see from me like just demonstrating here is the actual physical riding of this is pretty fun. Like any up and going, that feeling like you'd be increasing tempo as you go faster and if you hit some bumps and it causes like an internal short, and [OVERLAPPING].

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

MICHAEL UNA: ...with the sound. And so and then the dynamic experience too of having these beats generated as you're moving through space, and so reality is coming out you. There's all these sounds, you have to pay attention to things, and simultaneously you're trying to tweak this out like making some cool beats, and so it rewards coordination in that sense.

What we have here is I'm showing magnetic switches I've lined up sort of ina row, and you can't have them on. If you had multiple magnets passed by the same switch, if you'd trigger that same switch a bunch of times, I would lay them out in a row and then the magnets themselves are in an outward spiral pattern, so they don't interfere with each other and accidentally trigger the wrong one. So you can see on one side, I have the quarter notes and then my eighth notes are on the other side and they are offset so they don't hit each other.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: If you get real fancy, you hit the bell too, right?

MICHAEL UNA: Yeah. Totally. You can get a little analog in there.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]