Last Saturday we hosted with Guerilla Science the first installment of the Hacked Human Orchestra workshops at our lovely home, The Centre for Creative Collaboration. We’ve been very lucky to work with Shauna Concannon, who is studying for her PhD at Queen Mary, and Kobakant (Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson) both of whom have been working with us on developing the workshop.

Our wonderful participants stitched an elaborate soft circuit which will power a wearable piano and also made sensors including soft circuit pompoms, french chains, buttons (or keys) for the piano and even dino-style spikes!

Soft circuit for a wearable piano

Dino spike which closes a circuit when squeezed!

Soft circuit pompom, made with conductive and non conductive yarn, good to use as a tilt switch.

Learning about the circuit for the wearable piano.

Testing the circuit with a button/piano key made from conductive fabric, felt and foam.

The Hacked Human Orchestra workshop space.

The next stage is to take the project to Shambala and Wilderness festivals where festival-goers will add to the circuits made in last weeks workshop, creating a wearable piano, and also work on more instruments as well. The result will be a walking, soft circuit orchestra which will be lead by composer Florian Lunaire.

Our presentation and the learning materials from the workshop can  downloaded here and you can find more images from the day on Flickr. A great video of the day, created by Debbie Davies is below:

This project is generously being supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering.