An 8-inch wooden cube may be an unlikely spark for a musical
revolution – but that’s the hope of a collaboration of electronic engineers and
musicians working towards hackable electronic instruments that performers can
easily modify to produce sounds in surprising new ways.
The deliberately simple cube, which contains a sensor,
computer chip and speaker to transform touch into sound, is the creation of Dr
Andrew McPherson, whose work on ‘hackable instruments’ at Queen Mary University
of London (QMUL), is supported by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research
Council (EPSRC) funding and input from London Music Hackspace.