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SoundMachine turns Lego bricks into a MIDI sequencer

Build a house party with a common toy.

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Mimicking early drum sequencers, SoundMachine transforms a 32x32 size Lego pallet into a lo-fi musical score, capable of reading the placement and color of Lego bricks and converting this information into MIDI input.

SoundMachine's inventor Mark Crosbie published the project on his website, an online database for Lego lovers where users can upload their homebrewed creations and share advice with fellow enthusiasts.

Crosbie was inspired by a project named "Soundmachines" by Berlin-based design studio The Product: "I was immediately struck by the simplicity and elegance of their three-turntable design, and started to replicate it in Lego."

He then transferred this aesthetic to the workings of a step sequencer, using Lego's Mindstorms NXT 2.0 brick scanners to read where bricks are placed, before sending this information to a laptop via USB. This input is then fed into Ableton Live (a composing and performance program) and converted into actual music using Ableton's library of drum-samples.

The NXT brick-sensors can detect six different colors: blue is the background color for the score, while white is used to separate notes and black bricks defining the borders of the score. This leaves red, green and yellow bricks to represent different notes to be added to the score. Each score consists of four tracks, with eight notes for each track, but Crosbie says he is looking to expand the project: "I've built three SoundMachine units to work together to compose more complex musical pieces," but he admits that he's "not much of a musician, so for now I play drum-machines and other 'techno' instruments."

Crosbie's other Lego creations include Cue-boid, a cube-shaped robot with caterpillar tracks, and a fully functional rendering of Google's StreetView car in Lego.

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9 Reader Comments

  1. You see, who says that you can't have fun with Legos? It's made for all ages all shapes and sizes!! That's the beauty of invention, no boundaries to the imagination and creativity!!
    177 posts | registered
  2. Not to be "that guy," but while I'm usually impressed by diy stuff and cool technology mashups, this was really unimpressive to me. Trying to make music this way takes at least twice as long, if not more, than making it directly in Ableton, and that's not even counting the time it took to build the rig and write the software. The Lego bricks add nothing to this project, so its only saving grace is its merit as an art installation, a tenuous judgment at best.
    1103 posts | registered
  3. I gotta agree with albeec13.
    Its a cool little project and all, but why would anyone want to make music this way?
    160 posts | registered
  4. That's not a drum machine. This is a drum machine!
    10676 posts | registered
  5. This reminds me of punch cards and the computers from the 1950's.
    943 posts | registered
  6. stragen001 wrote:

    Perhaps because they can.

    That's the beauty of building things with Lego, you can build almost anything you like. It will seldom be a perfect replica, it's not intended to be, but you can build it yourself.

    People make Key Holders with Mini-Figures, Raspberry Pi computer cases, or even make just about anything Apple produces but out of Lego bricks. And thousands more things besides... ... creations/

    The limit is your imagination and occasionally that one missing brick that got kicked under the sofa because you trod on it in bare feet.
    1193 posts | registered
  7. Wheels Of Confusion wrote:
    That's not a drum machine. This is a drum machine!

    that was every bit as charming and awesome as i hoped the lame lego sequencer would be.
    1153 posts | registered
  8. I really like what they've done here but I have to say, it's nothing new!

    Ableton is great but I'd imagine they were probably using Max4Live to do the programming, which links into Ableton. I use Max/MSP (version 5) a lot for my own work and it's quite simple to build in colour/shape detection and build a sequencer out of it. I'm not saying it's not impressive, far from it but it has been done many times before! Making a sequencer out of physical objects is actually a Hell of a lot of fun.

    The use of Lego is great though.
    108 posts | registered
  9. I think the point of doing it was to learn. The skills the builder learned might end up being useful in some other more important project. Anything that stimulates learning, no matter how useless it may seem, is still worthwhile as a learning tool if nothing else. Think of all the programming languages that have been invented just to teach students programming.
    3415 posts | registered

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