MIDI deck of cards

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.