MIDI deck of cards

This novel MIDI producer is a playable deck of cards, using hand-mounted NFC readers. Each card encodes a distinct note, and notes can be dealt out and rearranged into keyboards, melodies, arpeggios or phrases, which can then be waved over to play, improvise, or experiment.

The MIDI deck of cards uses ordinary playing cards that are affixed with Mifare Classic NFC stickers. One can also play NFC cards; alternately, one can affix NFC tag stickers to other objects or tokens to play them, although we like the playing card metaphor. The purpose of this project was to identify a familiar non-musical user interface and turn it into a musical one.

The instrument recognizes a chromatic range of 32 cards/notes, achieved by hashing the hard-coded ID of Mifare Classic NFC tags. The hand-mounted MIDI producers include momentary octave buttons to raise or lower notes by a single octave, and a “left hand” mode switch that brings the left hand reader down two octaves for playing piano-style. This gives the instrument a total range of over six and a half octaves.

This instrument incorporates a familiar human user interface (playing cards) and turns it into a musical interface, that allows notes to be arbitrarily arranged for experimentation by the musician or composer. For a composer, this instrument allows a melody or phrase to be laid out on a table, giving it both a useful fixedness (the musician can walk away and come back to it later) and a capacity to improvise over the melody.

Part of the technical challenge of this instrument is producing a response time acceptable for a musical instrument, despite the inherent delays in reading NFC tags. We identified a way to bend the NFC protocol in order to reduce response time to roughly 1/40 second, with the potential to be reduced further.

So far, handing it over to a 7-year-old, who began furiously arranging songs and playing with melodies. This instrument has great potential for music education, introducing an element of constructive play to music, as well as potential for musicians to compose and experiment with musical phrases.