The Magical Musical Thing

It might have been a Christmas gift or it might have been purchased at one of the many garage sales my mom frequented back in the day. The details of its arrival are fuzzy, however I remember its departure from our lives with great clarity. It sounded like an off key dying wildebeest from  Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Water did it in.

In 1977, force-sensing resistor or FSR was invented by Franklin Eventoff and this simple synthesizer was its first commercial application. Each button played a different sound. It wasn’t in tune and there was no way to tune it. Eventoff called it a ‘noise machine.’ There was a songbook that included ‘My Country ‘Tis Of Thee,’ ‘London Bridge is Falling Down,’ ‘Jingle Bells,’ ‘Greensleeves,’ and others. I don’t remember it. We composed original pieces of childish noise. I’m sure our patents were quite pleased.

Eventoff’s next musical creation was the Sonica. The miniature lute shaped body was hand fashioned out of mahogany with a brass face plate. Serge Tcherepnin designed the oscillator. Only 600 were made. It described as ‘By touching the frets on the neck the instrument produces notes best often described as between a theremin, sitar and a violin.’ It’s a charming little thing.

The technology is interesting. FSR is basically a resistor that changes its resistive value (in ohms Ω) depending on how much it is pressed. It returns a range of response. These days they are easy to get, low cost and easy to use. You can order one from Adafruit for six dollars. As they measure pressure, they can be used for types of touch sensing projects. I found some interesting ones – glow pillow, dance dance revolution pad, and for monitoring foot pressure.

FSR can be used with Raspberry PI and Arduino. Touch sensors have a place in the future world of Internet of Things (IoT) and home automation. A pressure sensor in a lid could track when you open a bottle of medicine and track how times it was open in a day. Turning off bedroom lights when you get out of bed. Scaring the pants off of people by triggering Halloween spooks.

In our wood paneled play room there were old double hung windows. One summer we used our magical musical thing to prop a window. It was left on still and exposed to wild summer storms. Water was not its friend.