The MARTAphone

Created by the Michigan Project Music student design team for the 2018 Moog Music Hackathon

02/2018

About the project

Project Music is a student organization at the University of Michigan dedicated to creating new and unique musical instruments. For the first time, our team participated in the Moog Hackathon hosted by Georgia Tech. The goal of this 48-hour competition is to design and build a novel musical instrument using Moog Platforms and other software, hardware, and prototyping tools. We created the “MARTAphone,” a versatile instrument controlled by sensors and physical movement, with additional effects being influenced in real time by a connection to Atlanta’s MARTA bus system. We qualified as finalists in the competition and in the end won the Judge’s Mention award.

As Vice President and Build Team Manager of Project Music I organized our club’s participation in the hackathon, including member recruitment, logistical and funding preparations. At the start of the competition my hackathon team and I analyzed the available sensors and resources at our disposal, and started to brainstorm designs that encouraged intuitive and creatively expressive human-machine interactions. Overall, it was a big collaborative effort to make sure we worked efficiently and that our goals were realistic for the short amount of time that we had.