An Electronic Engineering Approach for Turning a Lego Brick Piano into a Musical Instrument

Abstract

We demonstrate and reflect on a rebuilding and electronic engineering approach to augment and electrify a Lego brick model. Concretely, we turn the not musically playable Lego Grand Piano into a functioning musical instrument as a MIDI keyboard with 25 keys and a sustain pedal. Our proposed solution is unobtrusive, flexible, and reversible. We only use off-the-shelf components and instead of soldering we take advantage of the bricks' interlocking mechanism together with wires and self-adhesive copper tape, which also keeps the costs and required skills for our approach low. Two live performances evidenced by videos showed the practical and musical applicability. We created and reflected on an extensive step-by-step documentation of the whole transformation process which we offer for potential reuse purposes. Overall, our approach to electrify a brick-built model and turning it into an interactive musical interface was successful, insightful and has the potential to be expanded, but needs further elaboration with other brick-built models and for different application purposes than musical instruments. Thus, we explicitly invite researchers, designers, engineers, tinkerers, and makers who engage themselves in electrified and interactive brick-built models to get inspired by our approach, replicate, and advance it.

Pipe Organ Design Including the Passive Haptic Feedback Technology and Measurement Analysis of Key Displacement, Pressure Force and Sound Organ Pipe

“…Nowadays, the keyboard instrument is most strictly associated with the piano and digital keyboards, where the musical notes are defined by their initiation and release with the control of speed and time [1,2]. The piano's sound and noise play a crucial role as do the different key-pressing techniques as confirmed by several studies [3][4][5].The relationship between the pianists' finger movements and characteristics of the resulting sound in terms of the time and intensity of tones during the performance is proposed as a multiple force feedback keyboard or as virtual simulations to reproduce the feeling of a grand piano [6,7]. For the musician, playing an instrument is an activity that involves an acoustic sense and, in addition, is a multi-sensory activity, providing essential visual and haptic feedback information [8,9].…”