A sideshoot from BARG #5 Market Pong was retiring to The Wellington* to have a go on my prototype cake orchestra -  an attempt to build a musical interface for people without much musical ability but with an interest in cakes (i.e. me :)). Essentially, each cake has an instrument pre-assigned to it (in this case: viola, tuba, clarinet, taiko drum and a “choir” noise) and moving the cakes up and down above the board plays sounds at different pitches.

The aerial shot:

This shows all the internal gubbins emerging from underneath the cardboard stand, connecting light sensors beneath each cake to the Arduino board. To play the orchestra, you need to hook the Arduino up to a laptop – I’ve written a Processing programme that sucks in the Arduino data and blurts out noise.

cake orchestra (test) from mook studios on Vimeo.

Essentially, underneath the cakes there is a set of light-dependent resistors (LDRs), and as each cake is moved up and down, readings from the LDRs fluctuate. These readings are piped from Arduino into Processsing, which then uses the SoundCipher library to play notes. The pitch of the notes is related to the readings from the LDRs. The cat is all her own work.

After having a go, BARGers came up with some truly inspired improvement suggestions, partly detailed on the cardboard box (above), including but not limited to:

• adding a rotary cake switch, possibly using a nice firm cake like a rock bun
• adding a noisecore switch
• playing a version of Simon with cakes – each player has to copy the previous player’s notes,  and add a couple more
• limiting the noises that can emerge – i.e. remove the horrible blarts and squeaks
• making a separate board for each orchestra section, with 4-5 cakes on – so each player looks after one section
• as above, but with a limited number of cakes, so it’s like Musical Cakes – each player must compete for their “instruments”. Limitation of the cakes can be achieved by eating the spare cakes
• adding a nice sliding volume control, using a pencil line variable resistor
• make it more of a game by cutting up a song into MP3s, and having each cake launch one. Each player therefore has to play their cake, and therefore their bit of song, at the right moment to collaboratively play a whole piece
• adding more sensors so moving the cakes left and right change the type of instrument

Thanks to everyone (Mark, Pete, Michael, Nikki, Rich) for their suggestions – the next C.O. outing will be at Moseley Barcamp.

We also went a bit off-roadcake with other game suggestions:

• Cheese Trumps – whichever cheese is the saltiest/fattiest/most whatever wins the round – which means you win cheese crackers with which to eat said cheese. Cracker varieties used to denote different denominations of points; we’d try and borrow a wooden pizza stick to shuffle the crackers round the green baize table
• Battenberg Checkers – where the board and chips are all edible, and each player gets to snack on pieces they take (and possibly bits of board too). Players who do not care for Battenberg are permitted to remove the marzipan from the bits of board they win and make dice
• Swimming Proficiency On Land Certificates – wear your jimjams to chase after bricks

And lastly, this is not a game, but a plea for a local shop-type entrepreneur – please can someone create a café where little cakes spin round booths on a conveyor like sushi restaurants? We believed this to be the greatest untested cake café idea ever conceived, and we hadn’t even had too many old man beer pints.

*The Wellington people are friendly and allow external food in, including cakes, and didn’t even complain when the Cake Orchestra made some horribly squeaky top-of-the-range noises :). They also have a pub cat, who was a bit underwhelmed with the C.O., but is an Essential Pub Addition nonetheless.