Over the weekend I attended my first Music Hack Day London. I had been meaning to go previous years, but could never make it.

Although I typically would have been one of the people working on a web app – perhaps even trying out the Spotify App platform – this time I decided to go down the hardware route. I set out to make a musical instrument using an RC Helicopter. An instrument that would play sounds based on the position and altitude of the helicopter. In hommage to the Theremin, I called it the Helimin.

Using openFrameworks, I managed to track the helicopter with a combination of background subtraction and hue-based thresholding. With methods written natively by myself or ones provided by OpenCV.

To make sounds, the x and y coordinates of the helicopter are sent to PureData, in which I made an instrument… mostly from scratch. It was my first attempt making an instrument in PD… and I have to say it was a lot of fun. It really made me want to try programmatically making music some more.

Until then, I’m hoping to clean up the code and put it on github or something. But more details about the hack can be found on this page of the music hack day wiki.

The event itself was tremendous fun. The sheer amount of talent and cleverness present in the venue over the weekend was inspiring, if not intimidating.

Looking forward to next year.

Bonus feature: A picture of my flying a helicopter on stage at the Barbican.