Max Björverud and Håkan Lidbo’s Technoframes Form a Touch-Sensing Interactive Musical Triptych
Max Björverud and Håkan Lidbo, an artist working the media of sound and technology, has put together some smart, interactive wall-art installations dubbed “Technoframes” — powered by Espressif ESP32 microcontrollers and a Raspberry Pi.
The Technoframes triptych is designed for collaborative musical experimentation. The acrylic-faced artwork is adorned with iconography of the human hand, inviting physical touch; as passers-by respond, capacitive touch sensors connected to a microcontroller hidden in each frame detect said touch and begin playback of pre-loaded samples, turning the eye-catching artwork into an ear-catching synthesizer.
The frames hold 63 audio loops in total, with each synchronized to a central Raspberry Pi single-board computer hidden in a box containing a speaker and amplifier. This synchronization keeps the beat, ensuring that regardless of how many beats are playing across each of the three frames they’re keeping the same time — allowing for collaborative music-making with nothing more than a touch.
The frames are currently installed at the Rumtiden Idea Lab in Stockholm, Sweden; Björverud has published some scant technical details on Reddit, including revealing the use of Miller Puckette’s Pure Data visual programming language for the project, but no source code or design files have been publicly released.
