Magnebacus

Created by: Sophia Mehdizadeh, Daniel Ethridge, and Mohammad Jafari

2021 Moog Music Hackathon winner

02/2021

About the hackathon

The Moog Hackathon is an annual competition hosted by the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Music. While it traditionally takes the form of a 48-hour in-person hackathon, due to COVID-19 the 2021 event was adapted to a virtual format. Teams were given 9 days (to accomodate working at a distance) to create a novel musical interface using a Moog Werkstatt synthesizer, various sensors, and other software/hardware. Submissions were judged on the basis of usability, interaction design, sound design/mappings, creativity, and more.

About the instrument

Magnebacus is a novel electronic musical interface we created as our submission to the 2021 Moog Hackathon at Georgia Tech. At first glance, our instrument looks and operates much like a traditional abacus. However, we implemented several critical design choices to take this interface from a highly structured tool to an expressive musical instrument that not only takes input from the user, but also its environment.

This interface uses the Moog Werkstatt, a patchable, monophonic, analog synthesizer as the core of its sound generation. User interactions and environmental elements are measured via sensors embedded in the instrument. These signals are processed and mapped using Arduino and the software Max/MSP, and then sent via control voltages to the Werkstatt.

For more details, check out our poster!

More photos