Open Blog 3

So far for my interactive musical instrument, I have gone outside and trimmed a few branches to make the woven dream catcher hoops. I think this will look neat when it is with all of the technology and such. I have also found a branch to hang them from, so when I play the dream catcher instrument, they will be flat on the wall. I made a sketch of this in the photos below.

I have made 12 hoops because there are 12 different notes that I am going to have.

In scratch I found out that there are different notes and instruments to choose from, in my project I have the option to change the instruments if I wanted a different sound.

I looked through other peoples projects and learned how to set it up in a way that when the a, s, d, f, g, h, j, k and arrow keys are pressed, this will create an individual note for each key.

On Monday I will need to figure out how to make it to where the makey-makey can have a connection to all of those keys. I noticed on the back of the makey-makey there are places on the side for wire, this might be where to hook it up? I will look into it tomorrow to see what I can do since I have so many keys to connect.

Today, I also made a practice dream catcher with regular string just to see how much conductive thread I might need to use on each.

I found out how to get the makey-makey to make sounds, this is good because for some reason the computer in the lab wouldn’t work with it so I thought I wasn’t doing it right. It’s also good because I’ve never used the makey-makey. When we worked on it in class I was a little bit behind of my scratch project so I didn’t have enough time to play around with getting it to work. I am excited and I am liking the way that this project is turning out; even though it’s not the original idea, I think I might like it better!

List of things that I need to do tomorrow:

• String the hoops to make dream catchers with conductive thread

• Find out how to connect to the makey-makey for all the keys

• Arrange and hang the dreamcatchers in a way that will be easy to play