This novel MIDI producer is a playable deck of cards, using hand-mounted NFC readers. Each card encodes a distinct note, and notes can be dealt out and rearranged into keyboards, melodies, arpeggios or phrases, which can then be waved over to play, improvise, or experiment.
The instrument recognizes a chromatic range of 32 cards/notes. The players have octave buttons to raise or lower notes by a single octave, and a "left hand" switch that brings the left hand reader two octaves down for playing piano-style. This gives the instrument a total range of about six and a half octaves.
This MIDI deck of cards was created in Spring 2024, based on an earlier senior capstone project (an NFC card xylophone) by a team of students in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Binghamton University. Both instruments were developed in the Seymour Kunis Media Core at Binghamton.
The purpose of this project was to identify a familiar non-musical human user interface (playing cards) and turn it into a musical interface. This instrument allows notes to be arbitrarily arranged for experimentation by the musician or composer, and also introduces an element of constructive play with an obvious visual metaphor that has great potential for education. For a composer, this instrument allows a melody or phrase, or group of phrases, 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.