It’s under 2 days until the Hacked Human Orchestra workshop! We’re very excited about this and have thoroughly enjoyed partnering with Guerilla Science and working with Kobakant and researcher Shauna Concannon to produce it.

The process to produce it has been extremely varied, experimenting with an array of components and materials. We thought it would be fun to give you a little peek into what we’ve been getting up to over the last month whilst producing it.

One instrument which we’re very proud of is a soft circuit piano! It’s taken a lot of different iterations to turn it into a wearable instrument (displayed above in T-shirt form). The final piece has been created using a soft circuit (a circuit made with conductive thread, rather than using wires as you would in a traditional circuit) incorporating many different resistors, capacitors, transistors and 4 buttons, which depending on which resistor they’re connected to will make different sounds when pressed. The output has taken the form of a mini 8Ohm speaker which you can see attached to crocodile clips

The T-shirt was inspired by Kobakant’s solar T-shirt:

The first attempt of making this consisted of a circuit on a breadboard using various different resistors to create different pitches and the second one used the same circuit but using soft materials. We then moved onto the final iteration for which we had some help with our friend Iain Sharp from Lush Projects who helped us design the circuit. From it we created this wonderful piece which as well as the mentioned technical bits contains lots of colorful felt!

Other experiments have taken the form of playing with musical cards and other playback devices, toy hacking, making soft circuit buttons, making conductive pompoms and also creating dinosaur-like spikes which when squeezed change their tune!

We’ll be putting all the learning materials online next week from the workshop, including circuits and a list of components so that anyone can take download it and make their own wearable instruments!

Sophie and Shauna toy hacking.

Making squidgy dino-spikes, great to put on the back on a T-shirt perhaps?

Showing the conductivity of a pompom containing conductive yarn.

Making a button using felt, conductive material and foam.